Anish Kapoor at Palazzo Manfrin for 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Italy
28 January 2026
“For a long time I'd been thinking of my work as potential architecture. I've always been convinced by the idea that to create new art you have to create new space.”
– Anish Kapoor
During the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Anish Kapoor presents an ambitious new exhibition at Palazzo Manfrin, the 16th century Palazzo and Venetian landmark in Cannaregio which is home to the artist’s Foundation. This will be the second time the historic building has been open to the public.
‘Anish Kapoor: Palazzo Manfrin’ will bring together around 100 architectural models documenting projects both realised and unrealised from the past 50 years of Kapoor’s practice, alongside a series of large-scale installations and stainless-steel works. Anish Kapoor: Palazzo Manfrin presents Kapoor’s idiosyncratic approach to the space of the object and its potential to create new space in our encounter with it.
Kapoor is renowned for making sculptural objects on an architectural scale and for architecture that exists as a sculptural object. From the stretched-PVC installation Taratantara for the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, UK (1999), to the world’s first inflatable concert hall Ark Nova (2013) and the Monte Sant’Angelo Metro Station opened in Naples, Italy last year; the genesis of such monumental works is always the sketchbook and the model. These playful experiments in scale and form, in often the most basic materials of the studio, enable thinking and propositions to occur. Some are followed through into the world, others, yet unrealised, retain their potency as moments in thinking.
In the exhibition Kapoor explores the transformational quality of sculpture in new architecturally scaled works. Visitors are welcomed into the Palazzo via a monumental new black-pigment iteration of Kapoor’s seminal work, At the Edge of the World (1998), measuring eight-metres in diameter and suspended from the ceiling. A new towering mirror work will be exhibited, alongside the iconic Descent into Limbo (1992). Kapoor manipulates materials and concavity in these works to both expand and absorb the space around them, in experiencing these works the viewer enters the realm of what Kapoor has named the ‘non-object’.
The show also includes the grotesque and the scatological cement extrusions of Ga Gu Ma (2012), which oscillate between the mechanically-made and the organic as well as an immersive room composed of silicone and paint, marking a symbiotic moment with Kapoor's current painting practice. The ethereal wall-based blue monochrome pigment void, Violet Pearl over Burple (2013), exemplifies the artist’s ongoing interest in the possibilities of colour. This investigation is further extended by a selection of Kapoor’s Vantablack sculptures, a ground-breaking nano-technology material that has extended the artist’s exploration of the void, in forms that both appear and disappear before our eyes. This series is presented here four years after its first unveiling at Palazzo Manfrin in 2022.
Read the full announcement in The Art Newspaper here.
Image: Anish Kapoor, At the Edge of the World (1998), Photo: David Stjernholm
