Anish Kapoor’s fascination with the void has led him to create some of his best-known works. Now, it has also caused someone to fall into an eight-foot pit. Last week, a 60-year-old Italian man fell into a hole that was part of the artist’s installation Descent Into Limbo at the Fundação de Serralves, Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal.

The man was hospitalized following the incident, which took place August 13, according to the local newspaper Público. The work is on view as part of “Anish Kapoor: Works, Thoughts, Experiments,” the artist’s first Portuguese museum survey.

Anish Kapoor, Descent into Limbo (1992) at the Fundação de Serralves, Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto. Photo courtesy of Fundação de Serralves, Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto.

Anish Kapoor, Descent into Limbo (1992) at the Fundação de Serralves, Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto. Photo courtesy of Fundação de Serralves.

Visitors enter the installation through a small doorway leading into a freestanding concrete and stucco room, approximately 20 feet square. In the center of the floor is a circular pit whose sides are painted black so that it at first appears solid, hiding its true depths. Kapoor designed Descent Into Limbo to appear like an endless chasm in space; looking down into it is a dizzying experience.

A representative of the museum told the Art Newspaper on Friday that the “visitor is OK [and] almost ready to return home.” The museum had displayed warning signs and a staff member was manning the room when the accident took place. The installation was shut down, but the museum plans to reopen it “in a few days.”

Anish Kapoor, <em>Descent into Limbo</em> (1992), diagrams. Courtesy of Anish Kapoor.

Anish Kapoor, Descent Into Limbo (1992), diagrams. Courtesy of Anish Kapoor.

On the artist’s website, the work, which was first created for documenta IX in 1992, is described as a “cubed building with a dark hole in the floor. This is a space full of darkness, not a hole in the ground.”

“Anish Kapoor: Works, Thoughts, Experiments,” is on view at the Serralves Museum, Rua D. João de Castro, 210, 4150-417, Porto, Portugal,  through January 6, 2019. 

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