Anish Kapoor: When Sculpture Meets Architecture

There is a moment, almost as soon as you enter Anish Kapoor’s exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, when you stop looking at the sculpture.

Instead, your eyes drift to the building, then back to the Anish Kapoor sculpture. Then back to the building again. It is an unexpected reaction, but perhaps it shouldn’t be.

The Hayward has never been a passive building. Since opening in 1968 it has divided opinion more than almost any other gallery in Britain. To some it is an uncompromising concrete bunker. To others, one of the defining works of post-war Brutalist architecture.

Whatever you think of it from the outside, once inside something remarkable happens. Above all, the building changes the way you experience space. Staircases tighten unexpectedly. Walkways lift you above the galleries before returning you to them. Rooms compress, then suddenly open into vast concrete volumes. You don’t simply move through the Hayward.

You become aware of yourself moving through it. Few galleries ask so much of their visitors, which may be why Kapoor’s first major exhibition here in twenty-eight years feels so completely at home. It begins with a giant red membrane.

Something Red Is Breathing

Swollen with air and wedged tightly into the corner of the first gallery, it presses so hard against the concrete that it feels almost impossible the building can contain it. It behaves like a living thing. You half expect it to keep expanding; instinctively, it feels wrong.

Surely something this monumental should occupy the centre of the room. Instead, Kapoor forces it into the edge, where it presses back against the architecture itself. Almost without realising it, you stop looking only at the sculpture and begin looking at the room. The Hayward is no longer simply housing the work. It has become part of it.

That simple shift quietly changes the way you experience everything that follows. Then everything disappears into black. Kapoor’s voids remain among the most compelling works in the exhibition, not because they function as clever optical tricks, but because of the instinctive curiosity they provoke.

Into The Void

You watch people approach them cautiously, shifting from side to side, leaning closer, trying to catch the precise moment when illusion gives way to physical reality. It never quite does.

Photographs are equally hopeless. The mystery refuses to travel. What appears almost bottomless in the gallery becomes stubbornly flat on a screen, stripped of the uncertainty that makes the work so seductive in person. And yet the most fascinating part may not be the void itself, but what happens around it.

People linger. They double back. Strangers watch one another looking, quietly united by the same question: What exactly am I seeing?

Anish Kapoor is not simply manipulating material. He is manipulating behaviour. Just as you become comfortable with this strange game of perception, the exhibition changes register.

When Anish Kapoor’s Sculpture Becomes Flesh

Upstairs, the seduction turns physical.

The body, which has been quietly present all along in Kapoor’s membranes, cavities, openings and folds, suddenly becomes impossible to ignore. Vast red forms slump across steel structures. Silicone folds resemble flesh. Pale strands spill over hard edges like sinew.

The effect is visceral without becoming theatrical. These are sculptures that seem capable of bleeding.

After the mysterious elegance of the voids, the shift is deliberately uncomfortable. Space is no longer an abstract idea or an optical uncertainty. It becomes bodily: wounded, penetrated, stretched, exposed.

Anish Kapoor has returned repeatedly to blood, birth, sexuality, sacrifice and the uneasy border between the sacred and the physical. Here those ideas collide particularly powerfully with the brutalist concrete of the Hayward. Similarly, its architecture does not neutralise the work. It gives it something to push against.

Sacred, Physical, Unresolved

Works including “Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto” and “Ha Makom” deepen that tension, opening onto questions of memory, displacement, religion and sacred space. Their titles carry histories of their own, but Kapoor never requires the viewer to decipher them before responding.

You can follow the philosophical and religious references as far as you wish or you can simply stand in front of the work and feel something. That freedom is one of the exhibition’s greatest strengths.

Anish Kapoor’s sculptures can be intellectually dense, physically unsettling, absurdly playful and breathtakingly simple, sometimes within the same room. They resist the idea that contemporary art needs a single correct interpretation. Curiosity is enough.

It also explains why the relationship with the Hayward feels so convincing.

A Beautiful Confrontation

The gallery has always been an architecture that refuses to disappear politely behind the art. Its concrete staircases, heavy geometries and uncompromising volumes insist on being noticed. Kapoor does something similar with sculpture. His works alter the space around them, questioning where an object begins, where architecture ends and whether emptiness can have physical presence.

Together, artist and building become slightly antagonistic partners.

A blood-red membrane pushes against concrete. A dark opening appears to puncture a wall. A polished surface pulls the room into itself and returns it distorted. The Hayward frames the sculptures, but Kapoor repeatedly seems determined to destabilise the frame.

Nothing Looks Quite The Same After Experiencing Anish Kapoor

By the end, individual images remain vivid: the red membrane pressing against the architecture, the impossible darkness of the voids, the suggestion of flesh collapsing against steel. But what stays with you is the tension between object, body and building. in Contrast, Anish Kapoor makes you look at the Hayward differently. The Hayward makes you look harder at Kapoor.

And when you eventually step back outside onto the South Bank, even ordinary space seems momentarily less reliable. Some exhibitions fill a gallery. This one interferes with the way you see it.

Feature image credit:

Anish Kapoor Portrait by George Darell

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Hayward Gallery LONDON Tue 16 Jun – Sun 18 Oct 2026

Image Credit:: Hayward Gallery