Anish Kapoor’s Retrospective at the Hayward Gallery Puts Scale, Void, and Architecture in Play
A vast inflatable work that nearly fills the first gallery sets the tone for Anish Kapoor’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London: this is sculpture as encounter, pressure, and spatial argument. The exhibition arrives as a return to a venue that first mounted a major survey of Kapoor’s work in the UK in 1998, and it revisits the ideas that have shaped his practice since the early 1980s.
Kapoor first drew attention with sculptures coated in powdered colored pigment, works that seemed to hover between object and absence. Over time, that interest expanded into a body of work defined by voids cut into stone, reflective steel surfaces, and installations that alter the architecture around them. Among the best-known examples is “Cloud Gate” (2006), the 110-ton stainless steel sculpture in Chicago’s Millennium Park that turns its surroundings into part of the work.
The retrospective also recalls the practical force of Kapoor’s ambitions. At the 1990 Venice Biennale, the pavilion floor had to be reinforced for “Void Field,” a work made of 16 rough-hewn sandstone blocks with pigment-filled cavities. In 2009, at the Royal Academy of Arts, he installed a giant cannon that periodically fired balls of crimson wax into a corner. Elsewhere, he has designed architecture as well as sculpture, including the ArcelorMittal Orbit in London, the Monte Sant’Angelo underground station in Naples, and, with Arata Isozaki, the world’s first inflatable concert hall in 2013.
In the interview accompanying the show, Kapoor returns to a central concern in his work: the body’s relationship to sculpture. He describes the object not as a sealed form, but as something attached to and entangled with architecture. That idea is visible in “All of Nothing” (2026), the new inflatable work that almost completely occupies the Hayward’s 6-meter-high first gallery, forcing viewers to move around it rather than simply look at it head-on.
Kapoor’s career has long been marked by such contradictions. He won the Turner Prize in 1991, became a Royal Academician in 1999, and was knighted in 2013. Yet the retrospective suggests that the most enduring question in his work is not status or scale, but meaning: how a sculpture can be at once massive and unstable, material and immaterial, present and elusive.
