Anish Kapoor: Dissolving Margins

Anish Kapoor: Dissolving Margins, from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation proposes a bold and extensive exhibition of Anish Kapoor’s four-decade-long printmaking practice, debuting at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Washington State University.

Kapoor is one of the most influential contemporary artists working today. Renowned for works on an architectural scale such as Cloud Gate (2004) in Chicago’s Millennium Park and Ark Nova (2013), the world’s first inflatable concert hall in Japan, his works both engage public space and envelop the viewer in an interiority. In parallel with his sculptural projects, Kapoor has maintained a career-long commitment to printmaking, which began in the 1970s and continues to this day. While Kapoor’s prints have been featured in group exhibitions, this project will mark the artist’s first solo survey dedicated to this collaborative and often technical practice.

Renowned for his beguiling experiments with optics in all media and material, Kapoor’s graphic oeuvre similarly evokes a sense of awe as we contemplate the hallucinatory qualities of heavily pigmented prints that appear to breathe, expand, and dissolve before our eyes. Elsewhere, especially in his earlier works, Kapoor explores organic and biological forms—reminiscent of intimate anatomies of plants and humans—alongside an overarching metaphysical concern with expressions of presence and absence.

Adding resonance to the Kapoor exhibition will be the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art’s exterior façade. Designed by Jim Olson of Olson Kundig, the museum is wrapped in mirrored crimson glass. While the building reflects the campus life surrounding it, allowing one to perceive oneself within its reflection, it is also a mysterious form. Visually transitive, the perception of the building shifts with changes in light conditions, as well as the movement and angle of one’s gaze. In this respect, the building will amplify Kapoor’s investigations into visual perception and form, as well as his long-held fascination with the color red. “Red, of course, is the color of the interior of our bodies. In a way, it’s inside out—red.”

Organized by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. Funding for this exhibition and related programs has been made possible by a grant from Jordan Schnitzer and The Harold & Arlene Schnitzer CARE Foundation, by the Samuel H. and Patricia W. Smith Endowment, and friends of the museum.