Anish Kapoor has been a household name in the art world for the last few decades. I had been hearing his name for a while when his work came to Istanbul in 2013, with his signature use of convex and concave, his red and black. His work always invites one to look again and again, from different angles, to establish that you and it are on the same plane of reality. He treads that line between visual art and illusion and he is not one to shy away from creating works that make you feel small, verging on an encounter with the sublime.
His latest show at the Hayward, running from June 16 to Oct. 10, 2026, is a triumph, among other things, of using size to put the viewer in her place. His sculptures push the boundaries of the concrete Hayward Gallery, like paintings trying to push themselves out of the frame. The first work you see on the ground floor is an inflated red globe made of rubbery material. It is one of the works in the exhibition that awes you with its size and color and is almost an anti-thesis of the pieces on the first floor, which, rather than jump out of the frame, find more and more impossible space within it.
The best example of this is a steel sculpture embedded in the wall, adding an extra layer to the Kapoor convex-concave interplay. It is, at first look, a concave steel sculpture, but it distorts the reflected images in a way that suggests that the inside must be corrugated. When you try to understand the mechanics of the work and look at it from the side, all you see is a flat surface – Kapoor’s art is of a nature that refuses to share the process of its own material making. And this, naturally, makes him the magician, the illusionist, almost all viewers of his art agree him to be.
The first floor has a number of his works made with his signature Vantablack – purported to absorb 99% of visible light and who am I to question – starting with his black square. The black square naturally has a special place in art history, but for a Muslim viewer, it also calls to mind the Kaaba, the point where all prayers turn to, the end point of all our efforts. Here, the Vantablack makes one’s gaze sink into the black hole, resulting in a kind of vertigo.
This black square, in some senses, is the gateway drug, and once having messed up your dials of perception, Kapoor then invites you to look at his other pieces in a state of mind that is different from the one you entered the Hayward Gallery with. He does all kinds of things with the black, on the wall, on the floor and there is a round one behind glass which, when you look at it straight in the face, is no longer black, but a mirror that reflects back your image. I will give in to temptation and say that Kapoor’s art forces us, when we’re trying to look at his work, to look at ourselves.
The second floor houses the piece de resistance of the exhibition, "Mount Moriah," the piece that is on the poster for the show and which mesmerized us and had us debating for two full days whether we were prepared to spend 22 pounds ($29.40) each to see Kapoor. Already feeling we had had our money’s worth with the Vantablack changing our perception of shapes and surfaces, this monumental piece had us experience something akin to the sublime. A red sculpture almost dripping from the ceiling calls, I would suggest, to any woman’s mind the walls of the uterus breaking during menstruation. This is not a fanciful association because all the red and black imagery of cleavages in the exhibition, and the red and black clotted blood look-alike sculptures resemble reproductive anatomy.
It is not like Kapoor to provide "context" for his work, but with the name "Mount Moriah" and the text on the wall, we learn that this dripping block is an inverted mountain, where God instructed Abraham to sacrifice his son. Here, naturally different epistemologies vie for space, and because it is a hanging rock, it also calls to mind the Muallaq of the Dome of the Rock, where the Prophet Muhammad is believed to have stepped to rise to the heavens. What with the black square downstairs as a coda for all these miraculous objects and events, the exhibition becomes quite a religious experience.
Religious experiences vary too, as I am reminded while I do a tour of the metal convex-concave sculptures on the top floor balconies. An American visitor gets disoriented looking at one of them and says he feels like he is on Ayahuasca: "I stared too much into the black and now I’m trippin’," he adds. It’s a hot, but not one of the hottest days of 2026, and everyone huddles into the shady corner, as the sculpture’s bends bring the distorted shapes of several London landmarks into the balcony.
Indoors on the top floor are further body-part-like sculptures in red and black, but "Ha Makom" has the pride of place. The writing on the wall tells us it is inspired by the red mountains in Australia, and yet it is given a Hebrew name to connect it to the Abrahamic references of the lower floors. At the top of this rock formation that seems to be made up of concrete foam is a black door, which must open, if we follow the scripture, to the Sakinah, a concept to be found both in the Muslim and Judaic traditions.
All these references make the visitors fellow pilgrims, and like pilgrims, we eavesdrop on each other’s conversations for pearls of wisdom, and luckily, I hear someone say one must also visit the project space where they are showing a video installation. We happily follow this advice. The installation by Kulpreet Singh is called, in concordance with Kapoor’s theme, "Indelible Black Marks" and is a collage of Indian farmers burning stubble, turning the fields into apocalyptic canvases. It is a mesmerizingly choreographed work, and the fact that it manages to impress after an hour of Kapoor is testament to its evocative quality.
