Woah! Anish Kapoor

Ralph Rugoff celebrates Anish Kapoor at the Hayward Gallery, London

Jul 05, 2026

The American art curator Ralph Rugoff has been director of the Hayward Gallery on the Southbank, London for twenty-years. He stepped down this Spring 2026. He will be a hard act to follow. Rugoff’s choice of art show has been continuously outstanding, always questioning the perception of what art is. Those who have visited the Hayward over the last 20-years will have a favourite exhibition. There have been so many remarkable shows that it seems wrong to single out favourites but mine is ‘Martin Creed: What’s the Point of It?’ from 2014 (who can forget the white balloon experience?) – and another favourite ‘Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons’, 2023 - all that sand - and Yoshimoto Nara in 2025 and many, many more.

Now, in a glorious crowning of Rugoff’s achievements, his friend Anish Kapoor, the British-Indian sculptor, has returned to the Hayward 28 years on from his first show here, which coincides with the Southbank Centre’s 75^th anniversary. Kapoor has filled the Hayward galleries with spectacular creations. Anyone who knows the gallery, knows it vacant, high-ceilinged Brutalist spaces. It is at its best filled with monumental sculptures, vast paintings and rich colour, to complement the concrete walls. Rugoff has been inspirational, using the art space to amaze visitors. The current show is no exception in a visceral bloodbath of red. To complement it there is a cooler room dedicated to the void in works created in Vantablack, the blackest black; and roof-top exterior shiny installations.

Rugoff – his voice so quiet that one has to listen carefully to hear his words – states that one can feel ‘ripples of violence echo through the show’. At least I think that is what he said. Some works certainly challenge perceptions of what exactly one is looking at by being both unnerving and enthralling at the same time. A vast floor-to-ceiling- sculpture All of Nothing, 2026, opens the show at ground-level, a scarlet-red, shiny inflatable which looks soft. It is impossible to walk around, its placement makes it look wedged into the six-metre-high gallery. It is a gigantic blobby appetiser for the jagged, upside down mountainous piece, Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto 2022, in blood-red mixed media, suspended in air at mezzanine level. The brilliance of colour against greyish walls, staircase and apertures make one notice the space around the sculpture. Is this what Kapoor is exploring?

Kapoor is candid, saying that just because his works are huge, it doesn’t make them good. He is interested in the void, the space around a body of work. His title for All of Nothing, highlights this, being an inflated balloon representing nothing in particular. It is the viewer’s reaction to it that creates an imagination of what it is. The void is the focus of the adjacent ground floor gallery, a space with focus on smaller works created in Vantablack. One, which looks like a painting, brings to mind Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square of 1915 but here one can peer inside, into the void. Other small installations, such as concave mirror paintings invite interaction. And, what to make of Descent into Limbo – does one descend into limbo via a circle of blackest black? Is the black circular void a deep hole in the floor or an illusionary trick of the eye? It’s a deep, dark hole. Intriguing.

In an upper gallery the vast size of Ha Makom, 2026, (it means The Place in Hebrew) Kapoor’s latest work, is made from 31 separate pieces. To coat it in its rough red bobbly surface required one of Kapoor’s assistant to don a hazmat suit to spray on fibres.

In a top floor gallery individual eruptions of ‘blood and guts’ vaguely recall a stomach-erupting moment in the film Alien (1976). Here too are paintings, which have to compete with the muscular effects of artificial offcuts, guts and membranes discarded and trickling into a drain. Kapoor is known for challenging art convention, recalling perhaps Parisian art critics shock on seeing Claude Monet’s Impression Sunrise, 1872, for the first time. Kapoor’s work, like Monet’s defies convention and tradition. Walking through, around and under Kapoor’s monumental works, studying his paintings, or peering into dark voids, I was immersed in his inventive world, amazed at his originality.

The show is a triumph for Kapoor, Ralph Rugoff and the Hayward Gallery. Rugoff’s final show at the Hayward is the essence of the director’s extraordinary achievements, making the Hayward THE place to see contemporary art in London, giving space to art experiences that stay in your mind.

ANISH KAPOOR, at the HAYWARD GALLERY, until Sunday 18 October 2026.

https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/venues/hayward-gallery/

ENDS All images copyright Anish Kapoor and The Hayward Gallery, London

Rosalind Ormiston, London 5 July 2026

www.rosalindormiston.com

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