The Pit is pleased to present Tuning the Void, the first solo exhibition by Chicago-based artist Anna Kunz at The Pit, opening May 9, 2026. The exhibition brings together a body of work rooted in Kunz’s ongoing investigation into the dynamic, relational choreography of color. The exhibition will be on view May 9 - June 17, 2026 with an opening reception on Saturday May 9 from 3-5pm.

Kunz approaches the painting process performatively. Over a career spanning more than twenty-five years, Kunz has collaborated with architects, dancers, and musicians, most notably creating décor for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. The artist is known for a body of work that spans canvas painting and large-scale installation, unified by an unwavering focus on color as the primary vehicle of meaning and sensation. Her canvases are built slowly through layered washes of acrylic and dye on porous, unprimed surfaces, so that canvas and pigment become inseparable. The resulting surfaces are not reflective but internally luminous, as though the light originates from within the work itself. She works with an expansive palette drawn from threshold moments, such as the light of dusk and dawn, inflected by the charged saturation of 1960s psychedelic posters. Her signature formal vocabulary of arcs, wedges, and interlocking color planes arranges forms that lean into and support one another with open, dissolved edges, creating a sense of harmony rather than conflict.

In Between Moon and Ocean, 2026 a vertical dark band divides the canvas into two distinct registers: on the left, a field of amber, pinks, and greens is anchored by a luminous cobalt circle and a half-moon of warm yellow; on the right, a body of intense red-orange swells in two great arcs against a dark background. The composition holds its two sides in careful suspension distinct in temperature and mood, yet structurally bound, evoking the charged space between celestial bodies as they exert quiet pull on one another. Rain or Shine, 2026 wraps a large circular form around the entire picture plane. Its concentric arcs of blue, lavender, and warm gray suggest both atmosphere and interiority. Inside the spiral, Kunz places softly geometric panels - a pale purple shape nestled between yellow, pink, and cream rectangles - so that the painting reads simultaneously as landscape and diagram, as sky and feeling. The painting’s title announces duality as its premise: whatever the condition, it endures.

Tuning the Void deepens a line of inquiry that has run through Kunz’s practice for decades: the belief that painting can function as an attention practice — a way of holding, rather than resolving, ambiguity. The exhibition title names both a process and a condition. “Tuning” refers to the act of painting itself. Kunz “tunes” the canvas by building color relationships across a porous surface until the forms achieve something like resonance, in the way a musician tunes an instrument by listening for what is slightly off. Sonic influence from early female electronic composers such as Éliane Radigue, Suzanne Ciani, and Maryanne Amacher, inform Kunz’s sense of rhythm and repetition. The color moves through the picture plane the way sound moves through space. “The void” is the unworked canvas and the empty gallery space but also, in Kunz’s framing, the contemporary moment — a world in which shared spaces are increasingly bifurcated by perspective, politics, and information. Each painting in the show occupies a threshold, a perceptual moment caught between states. Color fields remain distinct yet mutually sustaining. Here, edges are dissolved and no form claims absolute priority. In “Tuning the Void,” Kunz responds to our fragmented moment with color as material force — at once a signal and a balm.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​