PORTO, Portugal – A man visiting a Portuguese art museum was injured Monday after he fell down an installation consisting of a hole that has been made to look like a black circle painted on the ground.
The museum visitor, in his 60s, was treated at the hospital and released, according to Portuguese newspaper Público.
The accident happened at the Serralves Museum in Porto where “Descent Into Limbo” by Anish Kapoor is on exhibit. The installation consists of a hole in the ground that descends roughly eight feet.
Almost reminiscent of the portable hole gag in Wile E. Coyote cartoons, Kapoor painted the sides black, making the pit appear two-dimensional.
The exhibit reportedly had multiple warning signs and at least one employee tasked with keeping visitors safe inside the room.
“An accident happened,” Fernando Rodrigues Pereira, Serralves’ press officer, told Artnet News in an email. “Now this installation is temporarily closed.”
Pereira told Artnet News that the man is out of the hospital and “recovering well.”
Part of the “Anish Kapoor: Works, Thoughts, Experiments” exhibition, the installation is described for visitors as “an expression of Kapoor’s interests in the formal and metaphoric play between light and darkness, inside and outside, the contained and the infinite, which underpins his sculptural oeuvre.”
Kapoor is also known for Chicago’s iconic “Cloud Gate,” also widely known as “The Bean.”
