For the Biennale, Anish Kapoor will exhibit 70 works in his Venetian palazzo

On the occasion of the 61st. International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale In Minor Keys, which will run from Saturday, May 9 to November 22, 2026, Anish Kapoor will open a new exhibition at Palazzo Manfrin in Venice, home of the Anish Kapoor Foundation since 2022 and accessible to the public after four years of restoration as a cultural device dedicated to artistic experimentation. 

This second Venetian exhibition by the artist, opening on 5 May 2026, adopts a lateral curatorial approach, focusing specifically on sculptural projects that verge on the architectural in terms of scale, ambition and visionary tension. Models, studies and formal propositions spanning over five decades of research will be presented—some realised, others still unbuilt, yet all conceived to reflect on the space of encounter between viewer and object, in an idiosyncratic oscillation between abyss and the sublime.

The exhibition weaves together monumental historical works and new productions, with particular attention to the less commercial dimension of Kapoor’s practice. The core of the show is composed of experiments and materials that rarely enter the market circuit but which, as the artist himself has noted, are crucial to sustaining the vitality of his sculptural language. Alongside Descent into Limbo — which will remain permanently in the palazzo — and At the Edge of the World, reimagined for Venice in an almost absolute black version developed with a paint related to Vantablack, previously unseen works will also be included, among them an immersive environment made of silicone and paint, conceived as a dense saturation of accumulations and chromatic gestures.

More than the usual retrospective, this project thus takes on the guise of a survey of the germinal phase of his sculptures, reaffirming Kapoor's position within the contemporary landscape while also allowing us to dwell on a little-visible phase of his creative process. 

Opening image: Anish Kapoor, At the Edge of the World (1998), Photo David Stjernholm