The art of opposites: major Anish Kapoor exhibition creates spaces and illusions at Serlachius

Anish Kapoor’s exhibition will extend across three exhibition halls, with a distinct whole created in each one. His range of materials has expanded continuously over the years. Serlachius will be showing an impressive cross-section of his recent output. 

“Kapoor’s art can be eye-tantalizingly beautiful, and almost immaterial, as if its forms had been created without the touch of a hand. But it can also be intensely physical, even brutal. It is an art of powerful contrasts,” says the curator of the exhibition, Timo Valjakka.

The first exhibition space will show Non-Objects, for which Kapoor has used Vantablack. This coating absorbs almost one hundred percent of visible light, obliterating the shapes of Kapoor’s works. He plays with illusions and immateriality, while black holes suspended in display cases draw viewers in.

In the second exhibition space, we will see large, expressive paintings that glow like red-hot lava or blood. Kapoor is concerned with metaphysical opposites: inside and outside, beauty and horror, birth and death. The paintings do not portray anything, they are actions rather than images. 

One work will fill the large exhibition space

The scale of Kapoor’s art has grown over the years, and many of his works come close to being architectural in character. At the same time, they are highly intimate. His vividly outlined, sensual sculptures dynamically hold the viewer in their grip in the spaces and environments for which they were created, and which they in turn help to shape. 

The artwork to be sited in the largest exhibition space is simultaneously both monumental and intimate, as if formed by autogenesis. Neither its nature nor its title will be revealed before the exhibition opening. Its size is reflected in the fact that the floor of the exhibition space has had to be reinforced to support its weight.

“The new work will be a total experience that makes use of the potential of a space six hundred square metres in area and eleven metres high,” says Pauli Sivonen, Director of the Serlachius Museums. 

2026 – an important year for Anish Kapoor

Spring 2026 will see Anish Kapoor open a total of six exhibitions around the world: besides Serlachius, two in the United States, and others in Germany, Italy and Britain. The exhibition due to open at the Hayward Gallery in London in June marks a homecoming for Kapoor who had a major solo show there in 1998. 

In the summer, he will have an exhibition at Palazzo Manfrin, coinciding with the Venice Biennale. 

“Anish Kapoor has already done enough retrospectives during his career. Despite his almost fifty years of active work, he is living through a very strong creative period. That is why we did not want to set about compiling an overview of his entire career, but decided to focus on more recent works,” says Pauli Sivonen.

Anish Kapoor’s exhibition will be on display at Serlachius Manor 23 May 2026–4 April 2027.

Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor was born in 1954 in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and moved to London at the age of 18, where he initially studied art at Hornsey College of Art and then at Chelsea School of Art and Design.

Kapoor gained worldwide fame in the early 1990s. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1990 and was awarded the Premio Duemila for Best Young Artist. The following year, he won the Turner Prize, considered Britain’s most important art award. 

His works are regularly shown in major art museums around the world and have been acquired for the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Guggenheim, Tate Modern, and more.Anish Kapoor was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2013 in recognition of his contribution to the arts.

Further information and image requests: Susanna Yläjärvi, Information Officer, Serlachius, susanna.ylajarvi@serlachius.fi, tel. +358 (0)50 560 0156,

Press releases and photographs: https://serlachius.fi/en/for-media

Serlachius is open:

in the winter season, 1 September–31 May, from Tuesday to Sunday, 11 am–6 pm

in the summer season, 1 June–31 August, every day 10 am–6 pm

Visiting addresses:


Serlachius Manor, Joenniementie 47, Mänttä, Finland
Serlachius Headquarters, R. Erik Serlachiuksen katu 2, Mänttä, Finland

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