on giant red sculptures, upside-down reflections and why the best exhibitions stay with you.
anish kapoor, ha makom 2026
anish kapoor, hayward gallery ran 16 june to 18 oct 2026
i've liked anish kapoor's work for years. i first came across it in the turbine hall at tate modern (marsyas, october 2002) and over time i've stumbled across his work in all sorts of places. a giant outdoor mirror here, a big bean there, and a rather spectacular helter-skelter for the london 2012 olympics.
the bean, as it's affectionately known, is actually called cloud gate and sits in chicago's millennium park. the olympic structure is the arcelormittal orbit, a 114.5-metre-high twisting red steel sculpture designed by kapoor with engineer cecil balmond. it's hard to miss. and if you happen to be in nottingham, there's also sky mirror, a huge concave mirror outside nottingham playhouse that reflects the sky and everything around it.
kapoor has a knack for making things on a scale that makes you stop in your tracks. i like the scale, i like the drama, and i particularly like his use of red. i'm a liverpool fan, after all. and red (along with the blackest black, features prominently throughout his work).
so i was looking forward to visiting his exhibition at the hayward gallery, and it didn't disappoint.
first, though, a word about the venue. i'm a bit of a fan of brutalist architecture, and the hayward is one of my favourite examples. opened in 1968, it was designed by a team led by norman engleback, including dennis crompton, warren chalk and ron herron, some of whom were associated with the experimental architectural group archigram. the building is all grey concrete, angular shapes, walkways and terraces. it has a personality of its own, and it feels like a fitting home for an artist whose work rarely does things by halves.
the stairwell is something else too. a central spiral staircase of exposed, board-marked concrete, with a curved concrete balustrade and terrazzo steps. it sounds like a fairly ordinary thing to mention in an exhibition review, perhaps, but i love it. it's sculptural in its own right, and the whole building has that wonderful brutalist quality of making concrete feel like something much more interesting than just a building material.
and then you walk into kapoor's exhibition, where the contrast between the grey concrete and the red works is fantastic. the red seems to come alive against all that grey. i'm not sure i need a more complicated explanation than that. you could probably find one somewhere else though if that’s your flavour 😋.
inside, there was plenty of what i'd expected from kapoor. shapes coated in vantablack (aka the blackest black), the extraordinarily light-absorbing material that makes some of his sculptures appear almost impossible to read. you look at them and struggle to work out where the object ends and the darkness begins. they seem to open into another dimension, creating a sense of depth that is difficult to explain until you're standing in front of them.
then there are the mirrors. huge, polished surfaces that turn you upside down, stretch your body into strange proportions and make the familiar look completely unfamiliar. it's a bit like finding yourself in an elaborate hall of mirrors, only this one is housed in a rather sophisticated art gallery.
my mate and i spent a good amount of time childishly giggling at our distorted reflections, overjoyed to see ourselves looking svelte for the first time in a decade. perhaps that's not the sort of response an exhibition curator hopes for, but we had a brilliant time.
and that's something i really enjoy about kapoor's work. you don't need to understand it to have a reaction to it. sometimes it's enough to stand in front of something enormous, strange or beautiful and simply see what happens.
there was plenty of red, too. giant red balls and enormous forms that seemed to push their way into the space. i found myself wondering how on earth they had got some of these things into the building. are they made to order? who buys them? can you order the colour you want that best compliments or contrasts your home furnishings?
further on, the mood became rather more unsettling. some of the works looked like giant, skinned teddy bears wrapped in plastic. upstairs, things took an altogether more visceral turn, with forms that resembled an abattoir of massacred alien life forms. they looked wet, fleshy and distinctly uncomfortable.
it was a long way from the fun of the distorted mirrors. the work was grotesque, even a little disturbing, but it had an impact. and that's another thing i like about kapoor: he can move from the playful to the unsettling without losing that sense of scale and spectacle.
i'm not one for over-intellectualising art. i appreciate that there's often a great deal of thought and intention behind what an artist makes, and i'm certainly not suggesting that those things don't matter. but i sometimes find that the language used to write about art gets in the way of the experience itself. too much theory, too many grand statements, and not enough about what it's actually like to stand in front of the work.
for me, what makes one exhibition better than another comes down to the experience of being there. does it make me stop and look? does it surprise me? does it make me laugh, feel uncomfortable or see something differently? and, most importantly, will i remember it afterwards?
i've visited plenty of exhibitions over the years, and i couldn't tell you much about some of them. others have stayed with me for decades. often, it's not because i've understood every idea or read every word on the wall or heaven forbid, the accompanying exhibition catalogue. it's because something has made a lasting impression.
the hayward show did that. it was spectacular, playful, occasionally grotesque and full of things that made me stop in my tracks. it made me laugh, made me look twice and gave me plenty to talk about on the way home.
and i've recommended it to other people. for me, that's the acid test. if i've enjoyed an exhibition enough to tell friends they should go and see it, then it's done something right.
i suppose that's what i want from art, whether it's a monumental installation in a gallery, a sculpture in the middle of a city or a print hanging on my wall. i want it to make me feel something. i want it to hold my attention. and i want it to leave me with a memory.
anish kapoor's exhibition at the hayward gallery ticked all those boxes. if you like your art on a grand scale, enjoy a bit of visual trickery and don't mind being confronted by the occasional giant alien carcass, i'd thoroughly recommend it.
just don't expect to leave with your sense of proportion entirely intact.
explore anish kapoor’s work available at luck contemporary.