Anish Kapoor has exhibited frequently in this country over the last thirty years, but until the projected ArcelorMittal Orbit for the 2012 Olympics he received no permanent sculptural commission, and yet it is his public sculpture that is most memorable. A taste of this has come to Kensington Gardens – four mirror installations occupy strategic positions between the Longwater and the Round Pond.

All art has an element of personal reponse about it irrespective of purpose, culture or critique. Public art requires us to consider also what this object says to us. The collective response, the sense of belonging and of ownership are of equal importance. Abstraction is the key to public art, whether figural or not. Abstraction permits us, as individuals and as a collective, to impose our own meaning or sense of self. Consider the Angel of the North, for example, which communicates through size and shape but is ambiguous in meaning.

With Kapoor, the personal response is essential; we are the exhibition, albeit some grotesque fairground version of ourselves. Our perceptions of land and sky are made to shift, blood red at times like a window on some infernal Martian cloudscape, otherwise serene, melancholy grey or joyful blue (that perennial British obsession, the weather, plays a significant role). There is something almost Platonic about the way the imagination refines the senses. Back in the 1990s Kapoor made sculptures out of powder pigment of such intensity they drained everything around them of colour; a dark spot had the gravitational pull of a black hole. Here the objects portray illumination itself, and this is as true of a dark winter day as of sunshine, so that the world seen through them is something closer to perfection.

Until Mar 13

KEVIN CHILDS