Anish Kapoor, one of the most influential sculptors of his generation, returns to the gallery where he first became a name, filling the Hayward to Sunday 18 October 2026.
Anish Kapoor, the sculptor of Cloud Gate in Chicago and London’s ArcelorMittal Orbit, fills the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank until Sunday 18 October 2026.
Kapoor was born in Mumbai in 1954, to an Indian father who served in the Indian Navy and an Iraqi Jewish mother. He moved to Israel at seventeen before training as an artist in London.
His reputation rests on scale and surface: mirror-polished steel that warps a room back at the viewer, pigment so dense it reads as a hole, and voids cut into floors. He won the Turner Prize in 1991 and was knighted in 2013.
He holds the sole licence to Vantablack, a carbon-nanotube coating that absorbs almost all the light that hits it, and the licence is disputed among artists.
He staged his first major UK survey at the Hayward almost thirty years ago. This show is part of the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary season, and Ralph Rugoff curates it as his last after twenty years as the gallery’s director.
It sets new paintings and sculptures on the fragility of the body beside the mirror pieces and Vantablack works, with two monumental installations in red.