Nearly three decades after the Hayward Gallery staged the first major UK survey of his work, Anish Kapoor has returned to the Southbank Centre with a landmark exhibition spanning the entire building. Presented as a centrepiece of the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary celebrations, the exhibition reunites Kapoor with curator Ralph Rugoff and marks one of the most ambitious London exhibitions of the year.
Bringing together new commissions alongside seminal works from recent decades, the exhibition occupies the Hayward’s galleries and outdoor terraces, transforming the building into a sequence of encounters that challenge how we perceive space, matter and ourselves.
Over the past four decades, Kapoor has become internationally renowned for creating artworks that engage both the senses and the imagination. Working across sculpture, installation and painting, he has continually explored what he calls “the space of the object” — creating works that seem to exist somewhere between presence and absence, materiality and illusion. From seemingly bottomless voids to mirrored surfaces and monumental interventions, Kapoor’s practice invites viewers to question the reliability of perception itself.
Reflecting on the exhibition, Kapoor said:
“I am thrilled to be making an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery with Ralph Rugoff and to be returning to the Hayward after 28 years. The Southbank Centre has over the last 75 years been central to London’s cultural life and I am honoured to make an exhibition to celebrate this anniversary.”
At the heart of the exhibition are three monumental installations that each occupy an entire section of the Hayward. Visitors first encounter a colossal inflated PVC membrane that fills a six-metre-high gallery, transforming the architecture into a vast, breathing presence that challenges conventional ideas of scale.
A second new installation introduces a dark mountainous threshold emerging from an expansive red landscape, while Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto (2022) appears to defy gravity entirely as it descends from the ceiling, hovering only inches above the gallery floor. Overwhelming in both physical scale and emotional intensity, these works continue Kapoor’s lifelong engagement with the sublime — experiences that are simultaneously awe-inspiring, disorientating and deeply physical.
The exhibition also highlights Kapoor’s enduring fascination with perceptual instability. His celebrated void sculptures appear to open onto impossible depths, while works coated in Vantablack — one of the darkest materials ever developed — absorb light so completely that three-dimensional objects seem to collapse into flat, unknowable surfaces. On the Hayward’s terraces, monumental mirrored sculptures distort the surrounding Brutalist architecture and the bodies of visitors moving through the space, creating moments of discovery, reflection and disorientation.
Alongside these investigations into perception are a number of Kapoor’s visceral recent paintings and sculptures. Made using silicone, resin and pigment, these works evoke flesh, wounds and bodily interiors. Their raw physicality stands in stark contrast to the cool precision of the mirrored works, prompting viewers to consider what it means to exist in a world saturated by images of violence and conflict.
For Ralph Rugoff, this tension between opposing forces remains central to Kapoor’s achievement.
“Anish Kapoor has been globally celebrated for making art that is both sensorially engaging and deeply thought-provoking,”
says Rugoff.
“Utilising a wide range of scales and adventurously experimenting with different materials, Kapoor takes us on an exhilarating perceptual journey that plumbs existential questions, illuminating surprising links between our experiences of the sublime and extreme abjection, the spiritual and the physical.”
That duality runs throughout the exhibition. Kapoor’s works resist easy interpretation, operating instead in a space of ambiguity and uncertainty. They ask visitors to look beyond surfaces and imagine what might lie beneath, behind or beyond what can be seen.
Despite the monumental scale of many works in the exhibition, Kapoor himself remains sceptical of spectacle for spectacle’s sake.
“Just because a thing is big doesn’t mean it’s of any interest, or even good,”
The observation recalls Barnett Newman’s famous statement: “Size doesn’t count. It’s scale that counts. It’s human scale that counts, and the only way you can achieve human scale is by content.” Like Newman before him, Kapoor understands that scale is not measured in metres but in experience. The vast installations that fill the Hayward are compelling not because they are large, but because they fundamentally alter our relationship to space, perception and ourselves.
The exhibition also marks a significant moment for the Hayward Gallery itself. As Southbank Centre Artistic Director Mark Ball notes, it serves as a fitting culmination of Ralph Rugoff’s influential tenure at the institution, celebrating two decades of ambitious programming and boundary-pushing contemporary art.
Nearly thirty years after his first Hayward survey, Kapoor’s questions remain remarkably consistent. Yet in a cultural moment increasingly defined by certainty and distraction, they feel more urgent than ever.
Anish Kapoor, 16th Jun 2026 – 18th Oct 2026,
Hayward Gallery
A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition, including insights from psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, art historians Nancy Spector and Sandhini Poddar, and an extensive interview with exhibition curator Ralph Rugoff. Please note, this item is pre-order only and will be available for delivery in July. More information can be found HERE.
A Limited Edition hand-signed giclée print commissioned for the exhibition is also available. Taken from one of Kapoor’s recent gouache drawings, The Dark (2026) depicts his iconic motif – the void, as soft, sensual and iridescent opening. The Dark is an edition of 250 and sales support the Southbank Centre’s pioneering programme of events. More information can be found HERE.
Taking place across four Saturdays, visitors can experience Touching the Quick, a series of musical performances in response to specific sculptures in the show, composed by Brian Elias and performed live by horn player Ben Goldscheider.
On Wednesday 8th July 2026, Anish Kapoor will be in conversation with author and psychoanalyst Darian Leader to explore the psychological, spatial and philosophical dimensions of Kapoor’s practice. More information can be found HERE.
On Thursday 13th August 2026, Hayward Gallery Lates: Anish Kapoor offers a special after-hours viewing of the exhibition with a curated cross-artform programme featuring complementary performances and interventions. More information can be found HERE.
All exhibition photos © Mark Westall
