Twenty-eight years after his last major exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, Anish Kapoor returns with work that feels remarkably at ease in one of Britain’s most uncompromising buildings.
The exhibition opens with a giant red membrane, swollen with air and wedged into the corner of the first gallery. Pressing so insistently against the Hayward’s concrete walls, it seems almost impossible the building can contain it. Still expanding. Still pushing. Still under pressure.
Your instinct is to walk around it. Instead, the sculpture redirects you. Its curved surface draws you into the corner, where taut red skin presses against raw concrete. Almost without realising it, your attention shifts from the sculpture to the building itself.
The Hayward becomes part of the work.
It is a fitting introduction to an artist who has spent more than four decades using sculpture to alter the way we experience the world around us. Kapoor stretches, compresses and bends our perception of volume and distance. A corner becomes a place of pressure. A flat surface appears to open into infinity. A mirror folds the room back on itself. His sculptures do not simply occupy a gallery; they change the way we move through it.
Few buildings reward that way of working more than the Hayward. Its monumental concrete volumes, compressed staircases and shifting levels have never behaved like a neutral backdrop. Here, architecture and sculpture enter into a conversation, each sharpening our awareness of the other.
That dialogue continues through Kapoor’s celebrated voids.
They remain among the most compelling works in the exhibition, not simply because of the illusion they create but because of the way people respond to them. Nobody hurries past. Visitors slow down, edge sideways and lean into the darkness, convinced that another step or another angle will reveal the trick. It never does.
There is surprise. Wonder. Delight. Complete strangers compare what they think they can see.
Attempts to photograph the voids invariably fail. The mystery refuses to travel. What feels impossibly deep in the gallery becomes strangely flat on a screen.
Kapoor’s mirrored sculptures produce a different sort of encounter. Reflections stretch and fragment, drawing visitors into the work and folding the gallery itself into the sculpture. People laugh, wave and search for themselves among the distorted reflections. For a few moments, everyone becomes part of the artwork.
That playfulness is easy to overlook when Kapoor’s work is discussed, yet it is one of the exhibition’s greatest pleasures. Before asking profound questions about perception, memory or existence, he invites us to explore, to experiment and to be curious.
Then the mood shifts. The delight of the voids gives way to flesh. Blood. Birth. Wounds.
Great masses of red silicone slump across steel trays, pale sinews spilling over their edges. Against the Hayward’s exposed concrete, they become even more visceral. The architecture doesn’t soften their physicality; it heightens it.
Works such as Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto and Ha Makom introduce memory, sacrifice and sacred space without prescribing a single interpretation. Kapoor leaves room for uncertainty, trusting each visitor to find a personal path through the work.
By the end of the exhibition, it is difficult to separate the sculptures from the building that houses them.
You leave remembering the membrane straining against the concrete, the impossible darkness of the voids, your own reflection dissolving into polished steel and the raw physicality of the later galleries.
But the Hayward lingers too. The sculpture makes you look at the architecture. The architecture makes you look back at the sculpture. By the time you step onto the South Bank, the building somehow feels different.
You came to see Kapoor.
You leave seeing the Hayward.
- Anish Kapoor’s exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery runs from June 16 to October 18 2026
southbankcentre.co.uk/venues/hayward-gallery
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