Anish Kapoor’s major solo exhibition Anish Kapoor is currently on view at the Hayward Gallery in London. Marking the 75th anniversary of Southbank Centre, the exhibition brings Kapoor back to the Hayward Gallery nearly three decades after his 1998 exhibition, which was the first time a British institution had staged such an extensive presentation of his practice. Gathering his early works alongside recent and newly commissioned works, the exhibition spans more than four decades of Kapoor’s practice and takes over the gallery’s entire indoor and outdoor spaces. Sculptures and paintings engage closely with the architecture, extending across walls, ceilings, and floors to create an immersive environment between the works and the spaces that contain them.

The exhibition opens with All of Nothing (2026), a monumental PVC sculpture measuring six meters in height. The work is the largest work ever presented at the Hayward Gallery and cannot be taken in from a single vantage point; instead, visitors are encouraged to move around its expansive form, which appears to push outward against the architecture, encountering it only in fragments. Its title, "All of Nothing," derives from the paradox of a seemingly monumental presence that is, in essence, an inflatable structure filled with air. The work thus encapsulates Kapoor’s sustained exploration of presence and absence, fullness and emptiness. In the interior galleries, Blinded by Eyes, Butchered by Birth (2014), also made from PVC, hangs upside down from the ceiling, overturning the conventional hierarchy of the exhibition space.

At the center of the exhibition, Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto (2022) descends inverted from the ceiling, creating a palpable sense of tension as its monumental form appears almost to touch the floor. The work evokes the sublime, a concept that has remained central to Kapoor’s practice throughout his career. Outside the gallery, the exhibition continues with the stainless steel sculpture Tsunami III (2025) and the new work Cloak (2026). Reflecting their surroundings like mirrors, these works disrupt the viewer’s perception and encourage the discovery of unfamiliar images within familiar landscapes.

Kapoor’s paintings and sculptures from the past decade are also showcased inside the gallery. Works incorporating Vantablack, a nanotechnology-based material that absorbs an extreme amount of light, create seemingly bottomless black spaces, blurring the boundaries between two-dimensional surfaces and three-dimensional forms. Alongside these are recent works made from materials including silicone, resin, and red pigments. Their intensely visceral materiality evokes the body and its internal organs, heightening the viewer’s instinctive physical response to the works.

Bringing together key works from Kapoor’s early career with recent and newly created works, the exhibition traces the evolution and expansion of Kapoor's investigation into materiality and immateriality, presence and absence, and interior and exterior over four decades of his practice. Monumental PVC structures, mirrored sculptures, unfathomably deep black surfaces, and visceral bodily forms each unsettle perception in different ways, redefining the relationship between the artwork, the space it inhabits, and the body of the viewer experiencing it. Returning to the Hayward Gallery after nearly 30 years, Kapoor highlights his artistic practice by demonstrating how sculpture can extend beyond the autonomous object to transform architecture, space, and the viewer’s perception itself.