Anish Kapoor and the summer exhibitions at Hayward and Palazzo Manfrin

From the AD HOC NEWS Art Desk » Exhibition & Show Desk - The editors cover exhibitions, auctions, collections, prizes and artistic positions. Published: August 24, 2026 · Last checked: August 24, 2026, 3:56 PM

Anish Kapoor anchors two high-profile institutional shows in 2026 that crystallize how museums stage his immersive sculpture and architectural projects. At London’s Hayward Gallery and Venice’s Palazzo Manfrin, curators concentrate on large-scale works, void forms and decades of spatial experiments, as recent announcements and reports underline.

The Hayward Gallery exhibition in London

The Hayward Gallery on London’s Southbank is presenting a major exhibition of Anish Kapoor’s new and earlier works, with the show running from June 16 to October 18, 2026, according to information carried by Euronews and Reuters. The presentation brings together suspended crimson forms, distorted mirror pieces and void-like sculptures that play with visitors’ perception of mass, surface and darkness. This return to the Hayward comes almost three decades after the institution hosted Kapoor’s first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom, a historical echo underlined in contemporary coverage.

Media previews describe large-scale new works shown alongside key sculptures from earlier phases of Kapoor’s career, creating a cross-section of his practice rather than a strictly chronological retrospective. The Hayward’s brutalist architecture, with its concrete volumes and open galleries, serves as a testing ground for how Kapoor’s concave mirrors and pigment-saturated surfaces reshape the experience of space, an aspect repeatedly emphasized in recent reporting.

Palazzo Manfrin and Venice Biennale context

Parallel to London, Anish Kapoor is opening the second public exhibition at his foundation’s headquarters, Palazzo Manfrin in Venice, during the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. The exhibition Anish Kapoor: Palazzo Manfrin runs from May 6 to August 8, 2026, gathering around 100 architectural models of realized and unrealized projects from the past fifty years, plus new large-scale installations and stainless steel works. It positions the palazzo as both archive and laboratory for Kapoor’s long-term engagement with architecture and public sculpture.

Reports describe models for projects such as concert halls, pavilions and public monuments alongside immersive sculptures in pigment, cement, silicone and Vantablack, framing how Kapoor translates ideas from studio-scale to urban and landscape contexts. The show is only the second time the 16th-century palazzo has opened fully to the public since Kapoor acquired it, underscoring its evolving role as a foundation-driven venue rather than a conventional museum.

How the artist’s exhibitions articulate his work

The Hayward exhibition and the Palazzo Manfrin show together map two complementary strands in Anish Kapoor’s practice: perceptual sculpture and architecturally scaled projects. At the Hayward, the focus lies on material and optical phenomena, with mirrors, voids and dense pigment compositions interrogating how viewers inhabit space. In Venice, curators bring forward the planning-stage dimension, showing models, maquettes and documentation that reveal Kapoor’s dialogue with engineers, architects and urban planners over a fifty-year period.

Where the artist stands now

Against this backdrop, Anish Kapoor’s work is circulating simultaneously through major institutional platforms in London and Venice in summer 2026, confirming his position as a central figure in how museums stage large-scale sculpture and architecture-driven installations.

This article was produced with a.i. support and editorially reviewed. All statements without guarantee; auction results, exhibition dates and awards may change at short notice.