Anish Kapoor returns to Hayward Gallery with immersive exhibition

Anish Kapoor’s return to the Hayward Gallery turns the entire building into a confrontation with scale, reflection and the body. Opening June 16 and running through October 18, 2026, the exhibition marks a homecoming to the venue that hosted his first major UK survey nearly 30 years ago, and it arrives as part of the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary celebrations.

Curated by Ralph Rugoff as he ends a 20-year tenure as director of the Hayward Gallery, the show brings together recent work and early seminal pieces from Kapoor’s five-decade career. Southbank Centre says the installation fills the whole gallery with immersive works, many pressing against walls and floors or descending from the ceiling, and it warns that some pieces are suggestive of blood and entrails. That warning is not incidental. Kapoor has long built his reputation on the uneasy overlap between beauty and bodily unease.

The exhibition also makes clear what is new and what is familiar. Visitors will encounter newer works including Ha Makom and All of Nothing, an inflated red PVC membrane that greets them at the entrance. Alongside those pieces are works such as Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto from 2022, a huge red-and-black mass hanging from the ceiling. Set against Kapoor’s established language of shiny mirrored-steel sculptures, void-like black forms and large-scale installations, the newer pieces sharpen his ongoing interest in how color and matter can shift a room’s emotional temperature.

Kapoor told Reuters that he has long explored the relationship between object and non-object, and he argued that red sits at the center of that question because it can signal celebration, deep darkness, terror and fear all at once. That tension helps explain why his work remains so recognizable and so difficult to pin down. The sublime, in Kapoor’s framing, is not calm grandeur but wonder and fear together.

The artist’s stature gives the return added weight. Kapoor won the Turner Prize in 1991 and has become one of Britain’s most influential contemporary artists, with public works including Cloud Gate in Chicago and Sky Mirror. Reuters described him as 72 and Mumbai-born, a reminder of the long arc from early UK breakthrough to institutional canonization.

The Hayward last gave London a full view of that arc in 1998, when it staged the first major public-gallery showing of Kapoor’s work in the UK. That exhibition included more than 20 large-scale works, among them In the Beginning from 1997 and When I am Pregnant from 1992. Nearly three decades later, the new exhibition returns to that same architectural challenge, but with Kapoor now operating not as a rising figure, but as an artist whose monumental style has become part of the institution itself.