Viewing Anish Kapoor at Hayward Gallery

Nothing is as it seems at the Hayward.

Twenty-eight years after the Hayward Gallery staged his first major UK survey at a public gallery, British-Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor returns this summer; this time to take over the whole gallery and its terraces. A centrepiece of the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary programme, this exhibition brings together new and seminal works across sculpture and painting, curated by Ralph Rugoff as a fitting final flourish to close off his remarkable 20-year tenure as Director of the Hayward.

For more than forty years, Kapoor has pushed the possibilities of sculpture through bold experimentation with colour, scale and materials. His works are shrouded in mystery, often blurring the line between presence and absence and challenging our perception of reality. In exploring what he calls “the space of the object”, the artist asks viewers to look twice and reconsider how they experience the world around them.

Kapoor’s work has also always had a taste for spectacle. A vast, inflated PVC membrane fills one of the Hayward’s six-metre-high galleries, while another new installation sets a dark mountainous form above a sprawling red landscape. Elsewhere, Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto descends from the ceiling to hover just inches above the floor, turning the Hayward into a place where your sense of scale, gravity and space all begin to waver.

Throughout the exhibition, Kapoor’s famous voids, Vantablack sculptures and mirrored steel works continue the visual trickery, while recent paintings and sculptures made from silicone, resin and pigment bring a more visceral edge to the show, conjuring associations of split bodies and internal organs. A must-see this summer: just be prepared to lose your bearings.