Anish Kapoor has spent four decades making the eye distrust itself. His voids are not pictures of nothing. They are traps in which your own body returns as a question: how close are you, where does the floor end, and why does certainty suddenly feel like a bad habit?
At London’s Hayward Gallery, Anish Kapoor (16 June–18 October 2026) occupies the entire building and its terraces, almost thirty years after the gallery staged his first major UK survey in 1998. Curated by Ralph Rugoff as the final exhibition of his twenty-year directorship, the show places new monumental works beside the mirrors, pigment, apertures and visceral matter through which Kapoor built a language of presence by removing the comfort of an object.
When black becomes an event
Descent into Limbo (1992) appears to be a black circle laid on the floor. It is an actual hole, its depth made unreadable by darkness; a visitor fell into the work during a 2018 presentation in Porto. Elsewhere, light-swallowing surfaces flatten volume until a solid form behaves like an opening. The achievement is not technical blackness alone. It is the instant when sight stops being enough.
This is why Kapoor belongs beside Olafur Eliasson’s apparatuses of attention and Marina Abramović’s empty rooms. Each artist asks the visitor to complete the work, though Kapoor is less hospitable. His spaces do not hand attention back gently. They make it stumble.
Red against concrete
The opening encounter, All of Nothing (2026), is a colossal inflated red membrane wedged into a six-metre-high gallery. It bulges against the Hayward’s brutalist shell as if architecture had developed an organ too large for its body. The colour carries Kapoor’s familiar traffic between pigment, blood, ritual and meat; the scale turns that traffic into pressure.
The lineage runs through Marsyas, the flayed PVC trumpet stretched through Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2002, and the more recent paintings and sculptural masses that look excavated from inside the body. Industrial fabrication hides most of the hand, yet the work remains insistently physical. Material is not finish here. It is an argument, much as Sebastian Errazuriz refuses to let design settle for decoration.
The expensive edge of awe
Kapoor’s authority is also the exhibition’s risk. Mirrors, bottomless apertures and rooms consumed by red forms arrive with the confidence of a global studio that knows how to manufacture astonishment. Current critics have called the show everything from a divine bloodbath to spectacular, pompous and vulgar. Both judgements recognise the same problem: awe can become a premium special effect.
The old Vantablack dispute sharpens it. Kapoor’s exclusive artistic access to the ultra-black coating made a work about boundlessness look oddly fenced. The controversy does not cancel the voids, but it complicates their claim to universality. Nor does every gore-soaked surface reach metaphysics; sometimes theatrical flesh remains theatrical flesh. A sublime that never risks embarrassment is only branding.
The room that disappears
The strongest pieces survive that objection because they do not merely enlarge Kapoor’s signature. They alter the contract between object, room and witness. A mirror turns the gallery inside out; a hole converts a safe floor into doubt; an inflated skin makes concrete appear vulnerable. The sculpture is not the polished steel, black aperture or red membrane alone. It is the few seconds in which the viewer loses the measure of things.
That loss is Kapoor’s durable material. The Hayward does not disappear, and neither do we. But for an instant both building and body become less certain—which is another way of saying that emptiness, handled well, can still have weight.