Anish Kapoor’s Naples subway station opens after 22 years in the making
Monte Sant’Angelo station in Naples brings Kapoor’s sculptural language into the heart of public infrastructure, with entrances that appear to erupt from the earth.
A new metro station designed by British-Indian artist Anish Kapoor has opened in Naples, bringing a monumental sculptural presence to the city’s public transport system. Monte Sant’Angelo station, more than two decades in the making, was formally inaugurated on Wednesday by President of Campania Vincenzo De Luca, alongside EAV President Umberto De Gregorio.
The commission was first offered to Kapoor in 2003 as part of an ambitious urban and cultural regeneration project in Naples’ Traiano district. The resulting station is not only a functional space, but a significant artistic intervention in the urban fabric – a subterranean landscape shaped by Kapoor’s long-standing engagement with myth, materiality and the void.
“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,” said Kapoor.
Kapoor’s concept for the station fuses sculpture and architecture into what the artist describes as a continuous topography – a space where interior and exterior are indistinguishable, and where the structural and symbolic merge. His entrances to the station take on powerful, bodily forms: one swells from the earth in weathering steel, raw and elemental; the other is a smooth, clean steel aperture. One descends, the other rises. As Kapoor puts it, the entrances are “objects as openings – sculpture and architecture as bodily organism”.
At the university entrance, a vast form of weathering steel appears to push up from below ground – “archetypal, raw and labial”, according to the artist’s studio – evoking not just a portal to a transport hub but a gateway to the underworld. The Traiano entrance, by contrast, is more refined – “smooth, tubular, rim-like and clean” – offering a reversed geometry that continues Kapoor’s play with space, inversion and interiority.
Inside the station, Kapoor worked with the late Jan Kaplický and Amanda Levete of Future Systems to develop a structure that remains rough and elemental, deliberately avoiding polished finishes. Tunnel walls have been left exposed to retain what the artist describes as “a singular integrity to the entirety of the work”.
“This is an architecture embodied with the porosity of the body – a collision of the functional and formal with the aesthetic and the mythic. It is art as architecture as never seen before,” said Kapoor’s studio.
The design language is unmistakably Kapoor: part Cloud Gate, part cavernous void. His exploration of the mythological object, the body and the void converge here in a civic structure that is also an artwork – or perhaps an artwork that happens to serve as civic structure.
Monte Sant’Angelo is part of Naples’ wider Art Stations initiative, which integrates contemporary art into the city’s metro system. While many of the stations feature murals or installations, Kapoor’s is the most sculpturally immersive to date. The entrances are not decorative but tectonic – they transform the very act of entering the metro into an encounter with form.
Despite delays – including a ten-year gap between the fabrication of Kapoor’s signature steel components in the Netherlands and their installation – the station’s opening has been met with both curiosity and acclaim.
Kapoor, who lives and works in London and Venice, is one of the world’s most prominent living artists. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1990, won the Turner Prize in 1991, and has created public works from Chicago to Versailles. Yet Monte Sant’Angelo may be one of his most immersive and socially engaged projects to date – a permanent work of art that thousands will pass through daily.
Elena Leo is the Arts & Lifestyle Editor of Ikon London Magazine.
