Anish Kapoor’s 2026 Is a Study in Weight, Glow, and Disorientation
Inside a 33,000-square-foot studio complex in southeast London, British contemporary artist Anish Kapoor (b. 1954) is moving between works that seem to pull in opposite directions: dense and airy, bodily and abstract, monumental and strangely elusive. The scale of the operation is large, but the real subject is subtler. Kapoor is still chasing the point where sculpture feels both physically present and just beyond reach.
That tension is on view this summer at London’s Hayward Gallery, where a major exhibition of new work runs through October 18. Critics have long noted Kapoor’s command of optical illusion, but recent responses have also focused on the more visceral quality of his sculpture. In the studio, those two impulses meet in works that are still being adjusted, sanded, and reconsidered before they leave London.
One of the exhibition’s centerpieces is “Ha Makom” (2026), a rocky, extraterrestrial form crowned by an ambiguous doorway. Its deep wine-red surface was still in progress when the work was seen in the studio, and Kapoor described the color as “vital.” He said the challenge is to make the object “have weight and glow at the same time,” even when the surface is built from wood pulp, fiberglass, and resin. The material, he noted, resists easy resolution. “It almost doesn’t want to happen,” he said, adding that the pitted texture creates “full of dark spaces” and a kind of “immateriality.”
That interest in instability runs through “Ancestor” (2026), a work made for Serlachius in Finland. In March, it was still in a skeletal state in London, with its wooden frame exposed. Completed on site at the museum, it grew to 30 feet in height and width and now grazes the ceiling. Kapoor said the early stage is about “inventing the form” and making it “full of adventure,” with repeated elements rearranged into something unpredictable.
The artist’s 2026 calendar is unusually crowded. Alongside the Hayward show, recent or ongoing exhibitions include the Jewish Museum in New York, SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Palazzo Manfrin in Venice, the Lehmbruck Museum in Germany, and Serlachius, where the show runs until April 4, 2027.
In another studio room, Kapoor is also working with Vantablack, the ultra-absorptive material he secured exclusive artistic rights to use a decade ago. The pieces recall Kazimir Malevich’s “Black Square” while pushing toward a different kind of visual collapse. For Kapoor, the larger question remains the same: how to make sculpture suggest a reality beyond matter without losing its physical force.
