Among the many exhibitions accompanying the 2026 Venice Biennale, Anish Kapoor’s presentation at Palazzo Manfrin stood apart. Rather than offering a conventional retrospective, Kapoor transformed his Venetian foundation into an exploration of sculpture as architecture, perception and psychological experience. Around one hundred architectural models, monumental installations and mirrored works spanning more than five decades revealed not simply what Kapoor has made, but how he thinks.

Venice has always been a city of illusion. Canals dissolve architecture into reflection, light continually reshapes surfaces, and the boundary between reality and appearance is rarely fixed. Few contemporary artists are better suited to this environment than Anish Kapoor, whose work has spent decades questioning the stability of space, material and perception.

Acquired by Kapoor in 2022 and now home to his Venetian foundation, Palazzo Manfrin represents far more than an exhibition venue. It is both museum and laboratory, allowing Kapoor to curate an ongoing dialogue between his own work, Renaissance architecture and the history of sculpture. Rather than occupying the building, the exhibition transforms it into an active participant.

Kapoor has often described sculpture as a means of creating space rather than merely occupying it. That idea becomes the exhibition’s organising principle. Sketches, models and unrealised proposals sit alongside completed works, demonstrating that for Kapoor the model is never simply preparatory. It is where sculpture, architecture and imagination first converge.

Walking through Palazzo Manfrin, one quickly realises that Kapoor’s true subject is not material but perception.

Mirrored surfaces bend and invert the surrounding architecture. Convex forms expand space while concave sculptures appear to swallow it. Reflection ceases to be a surface effect and instead becomes the mechanism through which the visitor enters the work itself. Standing before one of Kapoor’s polished mirrors, I found my own reflection stretched, inverted and folded into the surrounding architecture. The sculpture dissolved the distinction between object, viewer and space. Rather than reflecting reality, it reconstructed it.

This fascination with perception has defined Kapoor’s practice since the late 1970s. Whether working with pigment, polished steel, wax, stone or silicone, he repeatedly returns to the threshold between presence and absence. Objects appear solid before dissolving into optical uncertainty. Cavities seem simultaneously full and empty. Even colour itself becomes sculptural. Kapoor treats colour not simply as decoration but as material, whether through dense pigment or reflective surfaces that transform light into shifting fields of perception.

Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in Kapoor’s enduring investigation of the void.

Works such as Descent into Limbo, permanently installed within the palazzo, challenge one of sculpture’s oldest assumptions: that sculpture must always consist of something tangible. Kapoor reverses that proposition. Absence acquires physical weight. Darkness becomes material. The void ceases to represent emptiness and instead becomes an active presence.

The exhibition also reveals another, often overlooked aspect of Kapoor’s practice: his architectural imagination.

Many of the models represent projects realised across the world, while others remain deliberately unbuilt. Rather than presenting finished monuments, Kapoor invites visitors into the speculative phase of artistic thinking. Scale shifts constantly. Small maquettes suggest impossible buildings; monumental installations begin as studio experiments. They reveal that Kapoor thinks architecturally from the outset. Buildings become sculptures long before they are constructed. Sculpture becomes less an isolated object than a proposition for inhabiting space.

One of the exhibition’s greatest strengths lies in its setting.

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Palazzo Manfrin remains visibly unfinished after years of restoration. Rather than concealing exposed timber, worn surfaces and traces of history, the exhibition embraces them. The Renaissance palazzo feels suspended between restoration and reinvention, becoming an ideal counterpart to Kapoor’s own fascination with transformation. Architecture itself appears provisional, open and continually evolving.

The dialogue between Venice and Kapoor feels remarkably natural. Venice has always been a city built upon shifting foundations, reflections and optical illusion. Kapoor extends those qualities into the language of contemporary sculpture. His works do not compete with the city; they amplify its essential character.

Ultimately, the exhibition is less about individual objects than about ways of seeing.

Kapoor repeatedly destabilises the distinction between object and observer, inside and outside, presence and absence. Sculpture becomes an event rather than a fixed form.

Perhaps that explains why the exhibition lingers so vividly after leaving Palazzo Manfrin. Kapoor does not simply ask us to look at sculpture.

He asks us to question whether space is something we inhabit—or something that inhabits us.

Perhaps that is Kapoor’s greatest achievement. His sculptures do not simply occupy space; they fundamentally alter the way we experience it. Long after leaving Palazzo Manfrin, it is not the objects that remain most vividly in the mind, but the altered perception they leave behind.