Anish Kapoor Fills the Hayward Again, Twenty-Eight Years On

There are artists who make objects, and there are artists who bend the room around them. Anish Kapoor has always belonged to the second kind, and this summer the Hayward Gallery has handed him the whole building to prove it. His new exhibition, running from 16 June to 18 October 2026, is his first survey at the gallery since 1998 — a gap of twenty-eight years — and it arrives as the centrepiece of the Southbank Centre’s seventy-fifth anniversary programme. If you have ever wondered what it feels like to stand inside a work of art rather than in front of one, this is the show that answers the question.

A homecoming with history

The 1998 exhibition matters here, because it was the moment the Hayward first made the case for Kapoor as a major British artist rather than a promising one. He went on to win the Turner Prize the previous decade, to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale, and eventually to become the sculptor everyone knows even if they cannot name him — the man behind the ArcelorMittal Orbit in the Olympic Park and the mirror-polished “Cloud Gate” bean in Chicago. Returning to the gallery that helped launch him, near the end of his career rather than the start of it, gives the whole enterprise a satisfying sense of a circle closing.

It is a homecoming for the curator too. Ralph Rugoff, who has run the Hayward for twenty years and steered it through some of its most ambitious shows, has chosen Kapoor as his farewell. That decision tells you something about scale of intent. Rugoff could have picked a safe crowd-pleaser to see himself out. Instead he has committed the entire concrete labyrinth of the Hayward, terraces included, to an artist who treats architecture as raw material.

What is actually in the rooms

The temptation with Kapoor is to talk in abstractions — the void, the sublime, the infinite — and lose sight of the fact that these are physical things you walk around. So it is worth being concrete. At the heart of the exhibition sit three monumental installations. The first encounter is a colossal inflated PVC membrane that swells to fill a six-metre-high gallery, turning solid architecture into something that seems to breathe. Elsewhere works press against the walls and floor or hang down from the ceiling, so that the building itself starts to feel pressured, occupied, almost alive.

Around these giants, the show gathers new and seminal pieces together: sculptures, paintings and immersive installations spread across the whole gallery. Longtime followers will recognise the recurring Kapoor vocabulary — the deep pigments, the concave mirrors that swallow your reflection, the surfaces so dark they read as holes in space. Newer visitors will simply find themselves disoriented in the best way, unsure whether they are looking at a dent or a bulge, a surface or a depth. That productive confusion is the point. Kapoor has spent a career making objects that refuse to sit still in the eye.

Why the sublime still sells

Critics have responded warmly, and it is easy to see why. The Guardian awarded five stars and described work that “moves, frightens and stuns”; the Independent called it “one of the art events of the year” and the Telegraph, “a riveting feast for the eyes.” Reviews like these tend to cluster around a particular kind of experience — art that produces awe rather than argument. In an art world often preoccupied with text, theory and the politics of the moment, Kapoor offers something older and more physical: the overwhelming encounter, the scale that makes you feel small, the colour so saturated it seems to hum.

There is a fair critique to make here, and it is worth voicing. Detractors argue that Kapoor’s spectacle can tip into showmanship, that awe is a blunt instrument, and that the void has become a brand as much as an idea. Those objections are not unreasonable. But part of what the Hayward show demonstrates is how hard this effect is to sustain across a whole building without it curdling into gimmick. That it largely holds is a real achievement.

Worth the trip

For anyone building a summer of gallery-going, this is a natural anchor. The Hayward’s brutalist architecture — all raw concrete and awkward angles — is the ideal foil for Kapoor’s smooth, seductive forms, and the two have rarely looked better together. It also sits within easy reach of the rest of the Southbank’s anniversary offerings, making a day of it straightforward.

The wider lesson, for those of us who spend time in Britain’s independent galleries, is that immersion is not a gimmick invented for Instagram. Kapoor has been pursuing it for forty years, long before the phone. What he shows, better than almost anyone, is that a gallery can be a place you enter rather than merely visit. Twenty-eight years after his first Hayward survey, that ambition has only grown. Go, if you can, before it deflates in October.