One of the defining artists of the past four decades, Anish Kapoor, returns to London’s Hayward Gallery with a major exhibition running from June 16th to October 18th, 2026. Spanning the entire building and its outdoor terraces, the presentation brings together new commissions, landmark sculptures, large-scale installations, and recent paintings, offering a sweeping view of Kapoor’s evolving practice.
Curated by Ralph Rugoff as part of the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary celebrations, the exhibition revisits the questions that have long driven Kapoor’s work: perception, illusion, mystery, and the tension between material presence and the unseen. Each work unsettles familiar ways of seeing, inviting visitors to reconsider space, scale, and reality itself.
Anish Kapoor’s artwork redefines space and scale
Three monumental installations anchor the exhibition. One gallery is occupied by a vast inflated PVC membrane that presses across the six-metre-high space, creating a startling sense of physical and psychological compression.
Elsewhere, a dark mountain-like form hovers above a striking red terrain, while Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto (2022) appears suspended just above the floor. These works draw on Kapoor’s enduring fascination with the sublime, confronting visitors with experiences that are at once overwhelming, unsettling, and awe-inspiring.
Vantablack sculpture and the art of perceptual illusion
Among the highlights are works coated in Vantablack, the light-absorbing material often described as the darkest substance on Earth. Viewed head-on, these sculptures appear almost flat, erasing depth and turning solid objects into enigmatic voids.
They are shown alongside Kapoor’s celebrated mirrored steel works, whose reflective surfaces bend architecture and distort the viewer’s image. Mirrors, voids, and Vantablack forms create a shifting visual field where certainty slips away and appearances become increasingly unstable.
Recent works confronting human fragility
The exhibition also features a selection of visceral paintings and sculptures from the past decade. Built from silicone, pigment, and resin, these works evoke flesh, organs, and bodily vulnerability with startling intensity. In contrast to the cool elegance of the mirrored pieces, they confront mortality, violence, and the precariousness of human existence.
Installation view of ANISH KAPOOR, 2026. Photography by DAVE MORGAN
Courtesy of the HAYWARD GALLERY and ANISH KAPOOR. © ANISH KAPOOR. All rights reserved, DACS, 2026
