Anish Kapoor’s solo exhibition, Anish Kapoor: Early Works, is currently on view at the Jewish Museum in New York. This is the first presentation at a U.S. museum, providing an in-depth examination of the artist’s ongoing exploration of the boundaries between sculpture, color, and form. As implied by the title, the exhibition showcases 55 works from the 1970s and 1980s, including rare sketches and drawings on paper. 

Anish Kapoor: Early Works focuses on Kapoor’s sculptural practice developed within the contexts of conceptual art and minimalism, examining questions of materiality and existence. After passing through Israel in the early 1970s, Kapoor moved to the United Kingdom to study art, where he gained international recognition through a distinctive formal language. Since he had limited resources to work with, he adopted powdered pigments made from dust gathered from his studio floor to create sculptures. The exhibition reveals the transformation of everyday, non-art materials into new sculptural possibilities. Alongside sculptures, the show also presents early drawings and gouache works. These small-scale works on paper depict subtle, amorphous forms and stand in contrast to his sculptures, while establishing an aesthetic balance between the two media.

The exhibition also places these early works in dialogue with more recent pieces that employ Vantablack, a nanotechnology material that absorbs up to 99.965% of light. Through this juxtaposition, Kapoor continues to investigate the presence and absence of color and the limitations of materiality, which have been a central theme throughout his career. By tracing meaningful continuities from his early experiments to his latest works, the exhibition documents the evolution of Kapoor’s artistic journey and sculptural language.

Organized in conjunction with the Jewish Museum’s reopening, this solo exhibition also reflects on Kapoor’s Jewish identity and artistic origins. By examining the spiritual, psychological, and physical dimensions of sculpture and inviting the audience to experience carefully calibrated spatial relationships in different ways, the exhibition illuminates the foundational investigations that later evolved into Kapoor’s monumental sculptural works.