Anish Kapoor disorientates, delights and disturbs at the Hayward Gallery

‘Traditionally in the art world, we think of scale as a problematic subject,’ says Anish Kapoor, speaking from his London studio as he finalises the works appearing in his major new Hayward Gallery exhibition, opening on 16 June. ‘In the sense that, why is it so big? It is a perfectly legitimate question, it seems to me. Barnett Newman used to say that scale is not a matter of size, it's a matter of meaning.’

For the Mumbai-born, Turner Prize-winning artist, the scale is important for the physical reaction it incites in the viewer, a visceral response brought palpably to life in his landmark exhibition at the Hayward. In his first retrospective in the space for 28 years, new and fundamental works squeeze, drip and disorient in the Hayward’s Brutalist enclaves.

Kapoor’s works ask us to question the reality around us - where are we in the space, and how are we moving through it? How can our perceptions of what is real shift, and why are we so easily prepared to surrender our grip on lucidity when confronted with works which discombobulate us?

Take entering the exhibition, upon which we are immediately confronted with a vast, red, inflated PVC membrane that easily fills the six-metre-high space. Suddenly, we are small, squeezing around the perimeter of the work in a fruitless attempt to see it all. Elsewhere, perception is treated as lightly as proportion, in the epic Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto (2022) which hangs, impossibly, from the ceiling. In subverting the familiar curve of the mountain, Kapoor emphasises the unnatural nature of the act God asked Abraham to do at the location in the title. Kapoor’s mountain runs red with the blood which would have flowed had Abraham sacrificed his son, Isaac.

This exploration into ritual sacrifice, and the inner workings of the body, defines Kapoor’s practice. Upstairs, there are metal trays which ooze with red painted silicone forms that could be clots of tissue; sinews wind their way around the containers and spouts facilitate the draining of the ‘blood.’ All of life, in all its rawness, is here.

‘Think of Jackson Pollock,’ Kapoor says. ‘He pours this paint all over the ground again and again every day, in a kind of mad frenzy, and then takes this thing and puts it on the wall. When you see a Jackson Pollock, it is cosmic. He turns it from Earth and blood and body into cosmos - that's the fundamental alchemical transformation. That's why he's the great artist of that whole generation.’

Kapoor’s own transformations, from material into life matter, are equally sublime, and fundamental to our human experience. There is a room here dedicated to Kapoor’s famous uncoverings of the void, with sculptures in Vantablack – a substance created with nanotechnologies, which means it absorbs 99% of light – presenting delightful optical illusions. Try as you might, you cannot make out the shape, form or silhouette of these works, so entirely swallowed up are they by the material. It is a magic trick, and one in which we cannot trust our own senses.

‘I believe in putting the viewer in the place where it is all possible,’ Kapoor says. ‘[French poet] Guillaume Apollinaire’s notion was to take the viewers to the edge, and push them over - and that remains fundamental.’

Anish Kapoor at Southbank Centre's Hayward Gallery from 16 June – 18 October 2026