Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor returns to the Hayward Gallery at London’s Southbank Centre for his first major exhibition there in almost thirty years, taking over the entire building with mirrored steel sculptures, Vantablack voids and a body of new, unnervingly visceral work. Curated by Ralph Rugoff as the closing act of his twenty-year directorship, the show runs until 18 October 2026.

There are artists whose work you encounter, and there are artists whose work you enter. British Indian artist Anish Kapoor belongs undoubtedly to the second. After almost 30 years, a statement in itself, the artist returns to the Hayward Gallery, and makes it indubitably his own. With works that press against the walls, descend from the ceiling and open into the floor, he inhabits, and some might say changes, the entire space.

The exhibition is all encompassing. On one side, one finds his iconic steel mirror sculptures warping and folding reflections into distortions more rich than their original form. Where you, the subject, collapses into the surrounding room. On the other side, his Vantablack pieces. Vantablack is not a colour. It is the absence of light itself. The blackest known substance in the world, absorbing so much of the spectrum that any surface coated in it appears to simply stop existing. You cannot perceive it as something possessing form. It holds itself as if nothing.

Mirror and void. The world reflected, and the world consumed. This has always been Kapoor’s domain. His new works push even further. Visceral paintings and sculptures that come loaded with a content warning that clearly sets the stage. “Suggestive of blood and entrails”, it reads. And a new work titled Ha Makom, Hebrew for ‘the place’ and one of the names of God in Jewish mysticism, the divine understood here not as a being but as the space in which all things exist. Mirrors, voids, viscera, the sacred. All in one building on the South Bank. Running until the 18th of October, the show is one of the most important shows in London right now.

For more information, please visit Southbank Centre’s website here →

Last Updated on August 5, 2026