Miroslaw Balka’s latest installation at the Tate Modern may bea little too sombre for some - fortunately there's stilltime to make your way to Anish Kapoor’s solo exhibition at theRoyal Academy – it will explode your senses and sensibility,writes Lesley Bellew

Anish Kappor: “I have often said that I have nothing to say as an artist. Having something to say implies that one is struggling with meaning. The role of the artist is in fact that we don’t know what to say, and it is that not knowing that leads to the work.”

If you are lost by Anish Kapoor’s words, his latest exhibition will leave you more than slightly confused – it is hallucinogenic.

Kapoor lures the viewer into a false sense of security in the Burlington House courtyard with a new work, Tall Tree and the Eye, 76 stainless steel spheres that reach into the sky like silver helium balloons.

It is a calming and deceivingly simplistic structure – you can’t resist stepping inside to watch the 'balloons’ drift into infinity. Well, that’s how it seems.

But then you start to think about it: How do they stay up? What mathematical solution did he use to ensure this sculpture, manufactured and shipped over from New Zealand, remains vertical? It is not the flimsy, whimsical piece you first thought but the start of Kapoor’s optical magic show.

He continues his playful tricks as you enter the first of the galleries (he is the first artist to have taken over the whole of the ground floor in the academy’s 241 year history).

His early 1980s trademark pigment works, geometrical solids that look like they are growing out of the floor and walls, are so deep in colour that your eye loses focus on the red and yellow shapes. The contrast between the sharp lines, intense colour and soft powder coating is Kapoor’s idea of creating shapes that are 'there of their own volition’.

On the is wall is a large white bump – When I am Pregnant (1992). The swelling pushes out seamlessly. Stand too close and the bulge disappears, stand there too long and risk becoming dizzy and disoriented as the white turns to light.

The opposite effect is created by Yellow, in the next room, where a six-metre floating belly recedes into the wall. It is another interesting experience to be submerged by one colour. A rather joyous, floating feeling, actually.

If your head has not already begun to swim in the whirl of virtual and visual, it will when you encounter the sophisticated distorting mirrors that turn your world upside down. So smooth, so perfect, like Tall Tree and Eye the curvaceous silver sculptures appear weightless. Viewers are attracted closer and closer, only pulling back when vertigo sets in!

In the next rooms, Kapoor starts to turn on the psycho-sexual action. Shooting into the Corner – the headline piece that was exhibited in Vienna earlier this year – is part art, part performance.

The crude cannon (definitely phallic) fires 9kg pellets of crimson wax through an archway (now this is rape) so they thump against the white wall. The empty air-compressed canisters are left dripping at the end of the muzzle.

A male technician, dressed in a black boiler suit, repeats the highly choreographed action every 20 minutes. It is a piece of tense and violent masculine theatre which gives a tingle of excitement in the watching and waiting. The final action, although you know what to expect, is slightly shocking.

The wax is not cleared away, so by the end of the run on December 11, there will be 20 tons of crimson goo built up on the floor and walls. Expect to see more abattoir than artwork by then.

Kapoor’s show-stopper is Svayambh , a hulking 40-ton mass of the same crimson red wax (mixed with Vaseline I was assured by the guide). It is on a frightening scale, so enormous, so slow, creeping and squeezing itself through the neo-classical archways of the five galleries, it takes one and a half hours to travel from one end of the track to the other. As it does, the sculpture beings to shape itself, leaving a slag heap of wax piling up under the arches as the building flays its 'body’.. Peculiarly that’s the best bit.

In contrast to all the slipping and sliding, polish and reflection, Kapoor mixes a metaphor of urban life with creations reminiscent of when time began. Greyman Cries, Shayman Dies, Billowing Smoke, Beauty Evoked (2008-9) is a body of raw concrete sculptures masquerading, to me, as piles of giant worm casts or faeces. Kapoor created them through a computer program used in the cake-making industry, so he was not physically hands-on in their making but rather in the printing out.

Make what you will of the grim coiled masses. But make no mistake, Kapoor does talk to you though his art – it’s whether you get it, that’s all.

FACTFILE

Anish Kapoor studied at Chelsea School of Art and was elected to the Royal Academy 10 years ago. He won the Turner Prize in 1991, and has become one of the world’s most highly-regarded creators of public art since 2002 when his red, trumpet-like work Marsyas, dominated the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. He was honoured with the CBE in 2003.

Born in Mumbai in 1954, he is the first British contemporary artist to be given all the main galleries at the Royal Academy for a solo show.

At $23m, he created the most expensive piece of public art in the world in 2004 with his 20-metre polished steel shape, Cloud Gate, in Chicago. Kapoor is now making the world’s largest commission, a £15m series of five pieces, known as the Tees Valley Giants.

TICKET DETAILS

The Anish Kapoor exhibition runs at the Royal Academy, Piccadilly, London until December 11. Tickets £12, concessions £10, students £8, income support, unwaged £4, children 12-18 years £4, c8-11 £3, under sevens free, available from royalacademy.org.uk or telephone 0207 300 5839 (Monday to Friday, 9.30am to 5.30pm).

And if you really want to splash out

Discover London - Discover The Dorchester is an exclusive package available during the exhibition.

It includes a deluxe double room including full English breakfast for two, a pair of tickets to the Anish Kapoor exhibition plus two tickets to a London show (of the guest’s choice).

The luxurious, yet friendly, hotel in Park Lane, is a short walk from Burlington House.

Prices start from £635. Visit thedorchester.com