Few contemporary artists have managed so consistently to unsettle viewers about what they’re actually seeing. At first glance, Anish Kapoor’s works often look simple: a massive red form, an object made of mirror, a black surface, a hole in the floor, a strange sculpture that recalls flesh. But for Kapoor, sculpture is never simply about creating an object and then placing it in a space. It is much more about what happens to space, to our bodies, and to our perception when an object appears within it.
Right now London is hosting one of the most important surveys of this body of work: the Hayward Gallery’s major Kapoor exhibition runs through October 18, and it carries special significance as the artist returns to the same building after 28 years. Since his 1998 Hayward show, Kapoor has gone from being a defining figure of British contemporary art to a global art institution, even as his core questions have barely changed. Where does the object end and space begin? Is what we see really there in front of us, or merely our brain’s interpretation?
The current exhibition is powerful because it doesn’t function as a simple retrospective. Kapoor places new, monumental works alongside earlier, iconic ones, making clear how the same idea has evolved over more than four decades. The huge red installations, for instance, simultaneously evoke landscape, body, wound, internal organs, or some unknown biological formation. Kapoor’s red is never just a color: it is dense, aggressive, sensual, almost physically tangible. Among the new works on show are monumental forms that refuse to be taken in at a single glance. You have to walk around them, shift your vantage point, and as you do, the exhibition space itself transforms. This is one of Kapoor’s key insights: a sculpture isn’t necessarily a self-contained object, but an intervention that changes its surroundings.
This idea was already present in his early pigment works. In the 1970s, Kapoor began making sculptures in which pigment nearly erased the material itself, so that the object became present and invisible at once. From there the path leads to his later monumental voids, black holes, and mirrored surfaces. The “void” is one of his most important motifs: a dark recess where we can’t tell whether we’re looking at a surface or an actual space. Kapoor is especially radical here, because he isn’t trying to explain the work’s meaning — he’s attacking the viewer’s perceptual system itself. The eye says there’s a black surface there; the body senses something deep, uncertain, and potentially dangerous happening. His perfectly polished steel mirrors do the opposite: rather than absorbing the world, they multiply it while distorting it. Viewers see themselves and an environment in which the usual spatial rules no longer apply, all at once.
That’s why black and red are so much more than a simple visual trademark in Kapoor’s body of work. Black is absence, depth, invisibility; red is the body, matter, blood, violence, and life. His entire oeuvre moves between the two. One of the most extreme examples of this is his use of Vantablack, which let Kapoor create surfaces that absorb almost all the light that hits them. A three-dimensional object becomes a simple black smudge, depth disappears, and the eye loses the cues it normally uses to construct a sense of space. It’s as if Kapoor isn’t making a sculpture at all, but programming a tiny glitch into human vision.
And this is where the Hayward Gallery becomes genuinely interesting. The building’s raw, brutalist concrete architecture is almost ideal for Kapoor, because it doesn’t function as a neutral white cube. The monumental red and black forms collide with the architecture, occupying it, fragmenting it, and reinterpreting it. Viewers don’t simply walk from one piece to the next; they move through a space whose rules the exhibition itself keeps changing. That’s precisely why, in Kapoor’s best works, it’s impossible to draw a sharp line between the work and its environment. The ceiling, the floor, the light, the building, and the visitor’s own body all become part of what we see.
This is both Kapoor’s greatest strength and his works’ greatest risk. His monumental red sculptures, enormous mirrored objects, and black holes photograph extremely well. It’s easy to reduce them to iconic Instagram images. But the Hayward show reveals that these works aren’t really photographable. A photo shows the form, but it can’t convey the scale, the closeness of the body, the uncertainty, or the feeling of standing before a black surface and simply not being able to tell what you’re looking at. Kapoor’s art, in the end, always remains a physical experience.
Kapoor was born in Mumbai in 1954, moved to London in the 1970s, and over the course of his career became one of the most important figures in contemporary sculpture. He won the Turner Prize, created Chicago’s Cloud Gate — now one of the city’s iconic landmarks — and produced works on a scale very few contemporary artists have been able to match. But his significance doesn’t lie simply in monumentality. Kapoor is just as compelling when he isn’t working big. At the center of his body of work, one question has remained constant throughout: how much can we trust what we see?
That’s also what makes this London show especially timely. In an era when artificial intelligence, digital images, and virtual spaces make it increasingly hard to tell what is real from what is generated, Kapoor doesn’t try to solve that problem with technology. Quite the opposite: he returns to material, space, body, and light. He isn’t saying that everything we see is false. He’s saying that seeing, by itself, is no guarantee of anything.
Perhaps that’s why it still works so powerfully after more than forty years. Kapoor doesn’t want to show us what the world looks like. He forces us, for a moment, to doubt it. And at the Hayward Gallery, that doubt doesn’t appear as an idea — it physically surrounds us: in masses of red, in black depths, in distorting mirrors, and in spaces that, after a while, we can no longer be sure are the same ones we walked into a few minutes earlier.