Anish Kapoor's Formative "Early Works" on View at the Jewish Museum the Fall

New York, NY, June 24, 2025—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.

Born in Mumbai (1954) and following a time in Israel in the early 1970s, Kapoor moved to England to study art.  Since his first solo exhibition in 1980, he 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.

“The Jewish Museum has a long tradition of presenting contemporary art as part of its ongoing commitment to exploring the narrative of shared humanity worldwide, together with the rich diversity of the global Jewish experience,” said James Snyder, Helen Goldsmith Menschel Director. “Anish Kapoor: Early Works reinforces this mission by exploring the boundary-pushing practice of one of the most influential artists of our time, while also highlighting themes of ritual, perception, and the power of materiality that resonate across the diversity of world cultures and histories.”

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. 

"These extraordinary early works are virtually unknown to American audiences and represent a side of Kapoor that will be revelatory,” said Darsie Alexander, Senior Deputy Director and Susan and Elihu Rose Chief Curator. "Our show offers a rare glimpse into Kapoor’s process of pairing of color and form to explore the spiritual, psychic, and physical possibilities of sculpture.  A keen eye towards the placement of objects transforms how they are perceived by viewers and foretells a future making environmental works on a much larger scale. We are thrilled to be organizing this effort in collaboration with the artist.” 

About Anish Kapoor
Anish Kapoor is recognized internationally as one of today’s leading contemporary artists, renowned for sculptural works that are adventures in form and in engagement public space. 

Kapoor’s work has been exhibited worldwide, with recent solo exhibitions at Cidade Matarazzo, São Paulo, Brazil (2024); Liverpool Cathedral, UK (2024); ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Ishøj, Denmark (2024); and Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy (2023-24), among others. Large scale public projects by Kapoor include Cloud Gate (2004) in Millennium Park, Chicago, USA; Dismemberment Site I (2003–2009), Kaipara Bay, New Zealand; Turning the World Upside Down (2010), The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and Ark Nova (2013), the world's first inflatable concert hall in Japan. 

Kapoor represented Britain at the 44th Venice Biennale in 1990 with Void Field (1989), for which he was awarded the Premio Duemila for Best Young Artist and won the Turner Prize in 1991. He was awarded a CBE in 2003 and a Knighthood in 2013 for services to visual arts.

Born in Mumbai, India in 1954, Kapoor lives and works in London and Venice, Italy. He studied at Hornsey College of Art, London, followed by postgraduate studies at Chelsea School of Art, London. 

Exhibition Organization and Credits
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.