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    Descend into the Underworld via Anish Kapoor’s Sculptural Subway Station Entrances

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    All images courtesy of Anish Kapoor, shared with permission

    Descend into the Underworld via Anish Kapoor’s Sculptural Subway Station Entrances

    September 17, 2025

    ArtDesign

    Kate Mothes

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    West of Naples, along the Tyrrhenian coast, sits the storied Lake Avernus. Situated in a volcanic crater, its Latin name is synonymous with hell or the underworld, and to the ancient Romans, it was considered the portal to Hades. Dante Alighieri echoed the belief in his seminal Inferno. More recently, Anish Kapoor set out to explore the notion in a striking new entrance to the Monte Sant’Angelo subway station in central Naples. “In the city of Mount Vesuvius and Dante’s mythical entrance to the Inferno, I found it important to try and deal with what it really means to go underground,” the artist says.

    Kapoor is renowned for large-scale sculptures and installations that tap into visceral psychological experiences, from a perpetually swirling whirlpool of black water in “Descension” to a meat-like slab of wax being wedged through a doorway in “Svayambhu,” which references a Sanskrit word meaning “self-born.” And, of course, there’s the iconically mirrored “Cloud Gate,” known fondly as “The Bean,” in downtown Chicago.

    University entrance

    “At Monte Sant’Angelo station, three integral themes of Kapoor’s practice have coalesced in more potent form than ever: the mythological object, the body, and the void,” a statement says. The artist’s design for two separate entrances, initiated more than two decades ago, tap into his interest in dualistic relationships like internal and external experiences or lightness and darkness.

    Kapoor’s two entrances exist in dialogue with one another, as one is made from weathered steel with a rusty patina that suggests an amorphous bodily form. The other is conceived as something of the inverse, where a tubular steel form is presented more smoothly and “cleanly” while likewise hovering over travelers like a mysterious system or gigantic conduit.

    “The station is a remarkable symbiosis of sculpture and architecture, a dynamic that has always been a central force in Kapoor’s work,” a statement says. “Kapoor’s work both holds and creates the new space in which it is experienced.”

    Explore dozens of works on Kapoor’s website, and discover even more artistic subway stations around the world.

    Looking up from within the Traiano entrance

    A side view of the university entrance

    Looking down into the university entrance

    Traiano entrance

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      in Art

      Literary Citations Abound in Andrew Salgado’s Vibrantly Layered Portraits

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      “When We Cease To Understand The World (Grothendieck’s Ghost)”(2025), oil and oil pastel on linen, 180 x 160 centimeters. All images courtesy of Damian Griffiths and BEERS London, shared with permission

      Literary Citations Abound in Andrew Salgado’s Vibrantly Layered Portraits

      June 4, 2025

      Art

      Grace Ebert

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      A new body of work by Andrew Salgado (previously) unfurls from a central premise: we are the books we read. The artist, who works between London and New Brunswick, Canada, is literarily insatiable and considers every unread tome an opportunity of “infinite possibility.”

      At BEERS London, Salgado’s Self-Portrait as a Stack of Books presents a series of paintings that open like chapters and together, build a larger narrative. “My Year Of Rest And Relaxation” directly references Ottessa Moshfegh’s bleary novel of the same name and depicts a young protagonist inert and detached. There’s also “Véra (Please Come Over, You’re Always Welcome),” which portrays a resolute Véra Nabokov writing what might be one of her since destroyed letters.

      “Véra (Please Come Over, You’re Always Welcome)” (2025), oil and oil pastel on linen, 76 x 61 centimeters

      Salgado is continually interested in citation and the ways that memories and experiences layer atop and mold one another. Many of the authors he’s drawn to—Virgina Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, and Margaret Atwood among them— “are influenced by art. By music and painting. They write about it all the time. The word is ekphrasis,” he adds. “Nabokov lists over 150 paintings in his collected works. So why shouldn’t the inverse also be true?”

      Intuitive marks of oil paint and pastel characterize Salgado’s works and seem to build up over time. Irregular stripes and circles add greater depth and dimension to patches of color delineating a dress or facial feature, leaving each scene with a certain indeterminacy. Allowing for interpretation and an array of personal references is essential to the artist’s thinking: “It’s ready for the taking. And whatever you take from it—from the books, or the paintings, or the ideas within—it’s all right. It’s all correct. There are no wrong answers,” he says.

      Self-Portrait as a Stack of Books is on view through June 28. Find more on Salgado’s website and Instagram.

      “My Year Of Rest And Relaxation” (2025), oil and oil pastel on linen, 90 x 100 centimeters

      “St. Augustine’s Confessions” (2025), oil and oil pastel on linen, 160 x 125 centimeters

      “Hotel Du Lac” (2025), oil and oil pastel on linen, 152 x 117 centimeters

      “Meditations” (Sayings, Speeches, Notes) (2025), oil and oil pastel on linen, 150 x 120 centimeters

      “The Last Evening On Earth” (2025), oil and oil pastel on linen, 125 x 100 centimeters

      “Beware of Pity” (2025), oil and oil pastel on linen, 80 x 75 centimeters

      “The Aleph & Other Stories” (2025), oil and oil pastel on linen, 216 x 164 centimeters

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    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Art

      Dr. Ella Hawkins Reimagines Ancient Artifacts and Prized Objects as Edible Replicas

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      William Morris Biscuit Set. All images courtesy of Ella Hawkins, shared with permission

      Dr. Ella Hawkins Reimagines Ancient Artifacts and Prized Objects as Edible Replicas

      May 31, 2025

      ArtDesignFoodIllustration

      Grace Ebert

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      Academic research is notoriously niche and often opaque, but Dr. Ella Hawkins has found a crowd-pleasing way to share her studies. The Birmingham-based artist and design historian translates her interests in Shakespeare performance, costume, and matieral culture into edible replicas.

      Hawkins bakes batches of cookies that she tops with royal icing. Decorating takes a scholarly turn, as she uses tiny paintbrushes and a mini projector to help trace imagery of William Morris’ ornate floral motifs or coastal scenes from English delftware. Rendering a design on a single cookie can take anywhere between two and four hours, depending on the complexity. Unsurprisingly, minuscule calligraphy and portraits are most demanding.

      Ancient Greek Pottery Sherds

      Hawkins first merged baking and her research about a decade ago while studying undergraduate costume design at the University of Warwick. She decided to bake cupcakes based on Shakespeare productions that her class examined. “It felt like a fun way to look back at all the different design styles we’d covered through the year,” she tells Colossal, adding:

      I carried on decorating cakes and cookies based on costume design through my PhD (mainly as goodies to give out during talks, or as gifts for designers that I interviewed), then branched out and spent lots of time doing cookie versions of other artefacts to keep busy during the pandemic.

      She has since published an academic book on the topic and is a senior lecturer at Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. But she also continues to translate artifacts and prized objects held within museum collections into delicious canvases.

      There’s a set made in collaboration with Milton’s Cottage, a museum in the country house where John Milton finished his epic Paradise Lost. Anchored by a delicately crosshatched portrait evoking that of the frontispiece, the collection contains typographic titles and signs that appear straight from a 17th-century book.

      Delftware Tiles

      Hawkins ventures farther back in history to ancient Greece with a collection of pottery sherds inspired by objects within the Ashmolean Museum. With a bowed surface to mimic a vessel’s curvature, the irregular shapes feature fragments of various motifs and figures to which she applied a sgraffito technique, a Renaissance method of scratching a surface to reveal the layer below.

      The weathered appearance is the result of blotting a base of pale brown-grey before using a scribe tool to scratch and crack the royal icing coating the surface. She then lined these etchings with a mix of vodka and black food coloring to mimic dirt and wear. (It’s worth taking a look at this process video.)

      Other than a select few preserved for talks and events, Hawkins assures us that the rest of her cookies are eaten. Find more of her work on her website and Instagram.

      Medieval Tiles, inspired by The Tristram Tiles, Chertsey, Surrey, England (c. 1260s-70s)

      Milton’s Cottage Biscuit Set developed in collaboration with Milton’s Cottage

      Outlander Biscuit Set

      Elizabethan Gauntlet Biscuit Set

      Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member now, and support independent arts publishing.

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