A perceptual journey that combines discovery and disorientation
As a centrepiece of the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary programme, the Hayward Gallery announces details of its landmark exhibition from Anish Kapoor, marking his highly-anticipated return to the space after it was the first public gallery in the UK to host a major survey of his work in 1998. Curated by Ralph Rugoff, the show will span new and seminal works, offering a series of spectacular encounters with Kapoor’s sculptures and paintings across the entire gallery and its terraces.
Anish Kapoor is internationally renowned for making art that provokes the senses and the mind. Over the last four decades, he has relentlessly experimented with a wide range of materials to create evocative sculptures and paintings that spark a deep sense of mystery. From black holes to boundless mirrors, Kapoor’s work interrogates what he calls ‘the space of the object’, inviting us to look twice and question how we experience our environment.
Three monumental works that defy the boundaries of conventional sculpture will be at the heart of the exhibition, each filling an entire section of the Hayward. Visitors will first explore a gallery completely transformed by a colossal and imposing new work: an inflated PVC membrane that fills the six-metre-high space, challenging our sense of scale and self. In a second new work, a dark mountainous threshold looms down amid a sprawling red landscape contained within the upper gallery. In a third section, Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto (2022) will defy gravity as it descends from the ceiling, hovering inches above the gallery’s floor tiles. Overwhelming in size and emotional intensity, these monumental works elaborate on Kapoor’s fascination with the sublime.
The exhibition will also highlight the artist’s ongoing exploration of perceptual illusions, including seemingly depthless ‘void’ works and sculptures coated with Vantablack: a light-absorbing nanotechnology so black it makes three-dimensional forms appear entirely flat when seen head-on. Large-scale mirrored steel sculptures, placed on the Hayward’s outdoor terraces, will further immerse visitors in a perceptual journey that combines discovery and disorientation.
Lastly, the exhibition will feature some of Kapoor’s strikingly visceral paintings and sculptures from the past decade. Created using silicone, resin, and pigment, these intense works conjure splayed-open bodies and internal organs. The paintings and sculptures challenge our psychological responses, asking us to reflect on what it means to exist in an age where violent images are pervasive.
Ralph Rugoff, Director of the Hayward Gallery, says: “Anish Kapoor has been globally celebrated for making art that is both sensorially engaging and deeply thought-provoking, and we’re delighted to welcome him back to the Hayward 28 years after his first UK retrospective here. Utilising a wide range of scales and adventurously experimenting with dif ferent 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.”
Anish Kapoor says: “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’
Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX – 16 Jun 2026 – 18 Oct 2026.
Booking and full details: www.southbankcentre.co.uk
