Anish Kapoor's Formative 'Early Works' on view at the Jewish Museum this Fall
15 July 2025
From 24 October, 2025 – 1 February, 2026, 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. 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.
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.”
Explore via the Jewish Museum.
Image: Anish Kapoor, Part of the Red, 1981, mixed media, pigment, 28.3 × 118.1 × 157.5 in. (72 × 300 × 400 cm). © Anish Kapoor. All Rights Reserved, DACS, London/ ARS, NY 2025
