Anish Kapoor debuts major new installations at the Southbank Centre's Hayward Gallery

As a centrepiece of the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary programme, the Hayward Gallery presents a landmark exhibition from Anish Kapoor (16 June – 18 October 2026), 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 spans 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.

At the heart of the exhibition are three monumental works that defy the boundaries of conventional sculpture, each filling an entire section of the Hayward. Visitors can 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) defies 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 also highlights 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, further immerse visitors in a perceptual journey that combines discovery and disorientation.

Lastly, the exhibition features 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.

Taken altogether, the artworks in the exhibition ask audiences to shift their attention away from the surface, inviting them to imagine what lies beyond.