Anish Kapoor: Early Works

This fall the Jewish Museum presents the first American museum exhibition to focus solely on the formative early work of renowned artist Anish Kapoor. These rarely seen works include Kapoor’s striking pigment sculptures, together with works on paper and sketchbooks. On view from October 24, 2025 through February 1, 2026, Anish Kapoor: Early Works reveals the experimental proclivities of a trailblazing artist at the beginning of his career. The exhibition opens concurrently with the Jewish Museum’s inauguration of its newly transformed collection galleries and learning center.

Since his first solo exhibition in 1980, Kapoor (b. Mumbai, 1954) has gone on to become one of the most internationally recognizable artists working today. His distinctive sculptural idiom, which first emerges in these early works, brought a radically new voice to British art and then to the international stage. Drawing on an engagement with Conceptual art and Minimalism, his early work was suffused with his unique approach to materiality and presence. Through some 55 works on view, including a selection of recent sculpture, the exhibition will foreground the artist’s early and ongoing investigations of the boundaries of sculpture, color, and form.

Early Works will present Kapoor’s pigment sculptures in richly hued and evocative groupings that seduce and confound with their uncanny combinations of cleanly articulated forms with delicate and unstable surfaces of loose pigment that migrates across floors and walls. The exhibition will also explore how formal vocabularies and perceptual concerns present in Kapoor’s early sculptures connect to his later work. On view will also be select examples of Kapoor’s more recent sculptures created with Vantablack, a nanotechnological substance that absorbs nearly all light. Presented together, these sculptures showcase the artist’s masterful play with perception, drawing on the psychic effects of color—and its absence—as well as the allure of objects that appear to defy their own material nature.

Also on view will be a selection of Kapoor’s early drawings and gouaches. Intimately scaled, these works depict surreal, gestural, and subtly irregular forms, offering an aesthetic counterbalance to the formally austere sculptures where virtually all traces of the artist’s hand have been erased.

This exhibition is organized by the Jewish Museum’s Senior Deputy Director and Susan and Elihu Rose Chief Curator Darsie Alexander and Leon Levy Associate Curator Shira Backer, in close collaboration with the artist and his studio.