If you’ve ever visited “The Bean” in Chicago and thought, this is cool, but I just wish I could somehow go inside it, then Anish Kapoor’s new installation at Regen Projects is the show for you. Made of the same high-polished, flawless, undulating stainless steel, a series of wall-mounted concave/convex tondos 60 inches in diameter (all work 2019) flank the primadonna “Double S-Curve” which in a footprint of roughly 7 x 6 x 48 feet occupies the room like a Richard Serra made of mercury.

Despite your best-refined intentions, the work generates an irresistible urge to take s

Installation view of Anish Kapoor at Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

elfies. The swift optical currents and undertows generated by its sense of movement are unexpected and at times startling, the random moments of audio distortion, its ambient light-based changeability, the fisheye arcs of the architectural engagement across its surface, all of it is eye candy on an operatic scale. (The project room installation “Rectangle Mirror” (86 x  66 x 31 inches) makes the funhouse mirror energy even more explicit.)

Installation view of Anish Kapoor at Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

In a way it’s an easy win, a guaranteed crowd-pleaser giving everyone permission to play, to be in the moment, to enjoy it. A lot of Kapoor’s work functions this way. But also like much of his work, it does all this while at the same time asking, or eliciting, more profound questions about material and phenomenological qualities. Rather than a quest for transcendent meaning, at his best, Kapoor prompts a more meditative state of absolute now-ness. Finish fetish to the nth degree, while there’s no trace of anyone’s hand in its making, audiences can’t help but pierce its fragile, aggressive perfection with their own transformative presence.