Sarah Morris became known at the end of the 90’s with painterly depictions of the grid-like glass facades of office skyscrapers. In piercing colours, applied flatly and with unmediated directness, it is not only the buildings themselves that are rendered perceptible, but the codes of business strategy directed towards the outer world.

In September 2000, one year before the 9/11 attacks, the Anglo-American artist shot the 16mm film Capital in Washington D.C. Morris sketches the political architecture and the people who work in it in fast cuts. Buildings and places with a strong symbolic charge are shown: the White House, the National Mall, the Kennedy Centre, the Secret Service Headquarters and other administration buildings. The connection between architecture and its users become clear to the viewer and, because of their film-like characterisation, they undergo a kind of de-coding.

The painted series to the film was made after the events of September 2001. State Department (Capital) shows us more than a modernist view of the State Department. Although the geometrically exact technique of painting appears to leave no room for a narrative element, the painting reveals existing structures clearly and unambiguously.

Wolfgang Kos, 2005 (translation: Tim Sharp)