MOST art is overwhelmed by the great Gothic spaces of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s cathedral in Liverpool, where the centenary of its consecration is being celebrated this year. The monumental sculptures of Anish Kapoor (News, 16 August), however, are definitely and defiantly a match for the huge expanses of this, the largest Anglican cathedral in the world.

Sectional Body preparing for Monadic Singularity is a red and black cube in the well of the cathedral, so large that it can be entered, forming a room within a room. From the outside, its stretched membranes form void-like tunnels into which viewers can peer. Kapoor speaks of his voids as spaces filled with potential rather than emptiness. Among the potentialities provided by his works is that of photographic opportunities — a potential seized on by many visitors in their interactions with these engaging works.

Kapoor encourages such interaction, saying that “the layers of meaning in the work are not to be found in the telling but in the experience.” Inside the sculpture, the tunnels are red trumpet-like tubes intersecting black space, and involve viewers in ducking and crouching to navigate the diagonals of this intersected space. By entering the void and being turned upside down and outside in, we are encouraged to engage with the dualities of inside and out, geometry and fluidity, concave and convex.

© rob battersbySectional Body preparing for Monadic Singularity by Anish Kapoor, in Liverpool Cathedral

We see from a range of perspectives to look beyond, whether into the depths or up to the heavens, and, therefore, are asked by the artist to experience what the architect asked us to experience in first visualising and then creating this building. That experience is ultimately why this exhibition is so apposite as a celebration of this cathedral’s anniversary. Scott used 20th-century materials and techniques to create pointed arches that lead our eyes heavenwards, generating awe through light, space, and height. Whether directing us to the depths or heights, Kapoor mirrors Scott’s intent in his choices of works for this sacred space.

A kinetic bell-like wax sculpture sits within the main space just beyond the Dulverton bridge, which accords great views of the first two sculptures on this trail through the cathedral. This sculpture, which is slowly but continuously moulded by a mechanised steel blade, sits below the cathedral’s 13 bells, which are the highest and heaviest ring in the world. At the centre of the 12 swinging bells is Great George, a stationary bell struck by a hammer, which is bigger than Big Ben and second only in size to Great Paul at St Paul’s Cathedral. Kapoor’s sculpture mirrors the task of the cathedral’s bells, by marking time through the revolutions of its blade, which imperceptibly and yet constantly maintain the sculpture in time.

Spire, just in front of the sanctuary, is another trumpet-like structure, but this time the trumpet sits on its horn and is formed of highly reflective stainless steel. This work inverts the spaces around it and thereby transforms them. Kapoor describes his mirror works as “non-objects” that dissolve, liquify, and distort the reality around them. As we look into Spire’s reflective spaces, we are drawn into undefined space, a space that is immaterial, open, indefinite, and mysterious. Placed within the chancel, it soars upwards, and its verticality points to something beyond ourselves.

© rob battersbyUntitled sculpture by Anish Kapoor, in Liverpool Cathedral

In the choir aisles are large sculptural paintings, composed of silicon, paint, and gauze on canvas, which are hung high and create atmospheric landscapes, whether of skin or earth. Organic materials saturated in red or black, or red and black, are Kapoor’s raison d’être, reminiscent of forces undulating, oozing, swelling, pulsating, or erupting from below the coverings of skin or ground. What is it that lies within, beneath the gauze? Kapoor speaks his tendency “to go from colour to darkness” as “Red has a very powerful blackness.” He says: “This overt colour, this open and visually beckoning colour, also associates itself with a dark interior world.”

Finally, we reach the relatively intimate Lady chapel and a work of more human dimensions. Immanence is a rounded protruding form, carved in onyx marble. It is a becoming, developing form in gestation, a potentiality and a possibility inviting the question what this “proto-object” will come to be: what it is that is being brought to birth.

As was said of “Anish Kapoor: Untrue Unreal”, a show at the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, which ended in February: “Kapoor’s works transcend their materiality. Kapoor’s works merge empty and full space, absorbing and reflecting surface, geometrical and biomorphic form. In a world where reality seems increasingly elusive and manipulable, Anish Kapoor challenges us to seek truth beyond appearances.”

Kapoor is to be celebrated for such innovative and thought-provoking works; so this exhibition, his first solo show in a UK cathedral and his first major solo exhibition in Liverpool since his seminal 1983 exhibit at the Walker Art Gallery, is, therefore, a highlight in the year-long centenary celebrations. The works chosen by Kapoor span the past 25 years of his practice and, with Sectional Body Preparing for Monadic Singularity, feature work never before seen in the UK. The exhibition offers the opportunity to experience the diversity of sculptural languages which Kapoor’s art embraces in dialogue with the cathedral’s spectacular architecture.

© rob battersbyImmanence by Anish Kapoor, in the Lady chapel of Liverpool Cathedral

He has said of this momentous occasion: “To show works in Liverpool Cathedral is complex. It is a space that is alive both with the physical and spiritual. As such it is resonant with a powerful sense of body and the disembodied. The works that I have chosen to show in the cathedral are situated similarly between body and materiality and geometric immaterial which I refer to as the non-object. It is my hope that this conjunction of object and non-object here in this immense and potent space will be cause for reflection on the nature of religious experience and the human condition.”

The Dean of Liverpool, the Very Revd Dr Sue Jones, says that “within this great building the spectacular artworks on display challenge us to . . . contemplate what is beyond ourselves.” Kapoor’s works invite audiences to pause, reflect, and connect with deeper spiritual dimensions, echoing the cathedral’s daily explorations of faith and existence. As Elisa Nocente, head of the cathedral’s cultural programme, says, “Provoking both wonder and discomfort, Kapoor’s artworks transcend their materiality; we hope that they will resonate on a deeply physical and emotional level for our audiences, providing a spiritual connection.”

To support that hope, the cathedral staff have created a “Monadic Singularity” reflective space where visitors can leave prayers on a recreation of a supernova — a singularity from which new worlds and new possibilities are born.

“Monadic Singularity” is at Liverpool Cathedral until 15 September.

liverpoolcathedral.org.uk