New York, NY (June 4, 2008)— The Sopranos, an exhibition of eight portraits by the renowned artist Francesco Clemente, opens at Gallery Met on Thursday, June 5. The exhibition, created in collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera, features portraits of eight divas who figure prominently in the Met’s 2008-09 season: Diana Damrau, Natalie Dessay, Renée Fleming, Angela Gheorghiu, Susan Graham, Karita Mattila, Anna Netrebko, and Deborah Voigt. Clemente’s paintings, done within a four-month period, portray them as characters in their upcoming roles. “It’s almost a theatrical setting,” the artist says of the stage-like platform and stairway he set up in his New York studio. “We climb onto a kind of stage and work suspended up in the air…It seemed a natural movement for these opera stars to climb up to a higher level than everybody else.” To paint Netrebko, Clemente flew to Paris in early June, where she was performing in “I Capuleti e i Montecchi”. The oil on linen portraits will be displayed from June 5 until September 26.
An important figure in the contemporary art world, Clemente began his association with the Met and Gallery Met when he created the front-of-house banner for the Philip Glass opera, Satyagraha, which opened in April 2008. With work that combines both surrealism and expressionism, Clemente has made a place for himself as one of the most celebrated artists today; his work has been exhibited in leading museums around the world. In 1999, the Guggenheim Museum organized a major retrospective of his work, following earlier shows at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and the Sezon Museum in Tokyo. Clemente divides his time between New York City, Rome, and Madras, India.
The exhibition was conceived and organized by Gallery Met director Dodie Kazanjian. Inspired by the divas currently engaged at the Met, as well as by Clemente’s distinctive talent for portraiture, Ms. Kazanjian invited the artist to make the unique set of paintings. “When else in the history of opera, have eight leading opera singers of the day had their portraits painted by a single leading artist?”, she asks.
Gallery Met is free and open to the public seven days a week. The hours are Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. on performance days (closing at 6 p.m. on non-performance days) and Sundays from noon to 6 p.m. For more information, visit www.metopera.org. Gallery Met will be closed from July 15 through September 15 due to Lincoln Center reconstruction and will reopen on September 16.
ARTWORK TITLES AND DATES OF EACH PORTRAIT
Karita Mattila as Salome
February 18, 2008
Renée Fleming as Thaïs
March 5, 2008
Natalie Dessay as Amina
March 10, 2008
Angela Gheorghiu as Magda
April 7, 2008
Deborah Voigt as Gioconda
April 8, 2008
Diana Damrau as Lucia
April 28, 2008
Susan Graham as Marguerite
May 20, 2008
Anna Netrebko as Lucia
June 4, 2008 (Paris)
About the Singers in the Met’s 2008-09 Season
Finnish soprano Karita Mattila created a sensation when she first sang Strauss’s Salome at the Met in 2004. She returns to the role for the first time at the beginning of the Met’s new season on September 23. The October 11 matinee performance will be part of The Met: Live in HD series transmitted around the world. On January 30, she adds a new role to her Met repertory, singing Tatiana in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. Mattila’s performance of the title role in Manon Lescaut was one of last season’s Met HD transmissions.
Renée Fleming opens the Met season on September 22, in a special gala performance in which she sings Act II of Verdi’s La Traviata, Act III of Massenet’s Manon, and the final scene from Richard Strauss’s Capriccio. She also stars in a new production of Massenet’s Thaïs, her first Met performance as the title character, on December 8. Both the Opening Night gala and the December 20 matinee Thaïs will be transmitted in The Met: Live in HD series. In the last two seasons, Fleming has won audience and critical acclaim for her portrayals of Tatiana in Eugene Onegin, Desdemona in Otello, and Violetta in La Traviata.
Natalie Dessay, who opened the Met’s 2007-08 season in the title role of Lucia di Lammermoor and scored another triumph in April as Marie in La Fille du Régiment, takes on the role of Amina in the new production of Bellini’s La Sonnambula for the coming season. The new production, which marks the first time the French soprano sings this role at the Met, opens on March 2, and is transmitted live in HD to movie theaters worldwide on March 21.
Following her star turn in the “Met Summer Concert: Live in Prospect Park” on June 20, Angela Gheorghiu is featured in a new production of Puccini’s La Rondine next season, co-starring her husband, Roberto Alagna, as the tenor lead. The opera opens on December 31 and is transmitted live in HD around the globe on January 10. The celebrated soprano also reprises the role of Adina in Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore, on March 31. She was featured in one of her best known roles, Mimì in La Bohème, at the Met last April – also a Live in HD transmission.
Famed for her portrayals of the heroic soprano parts of Wagner and Strauss, Deborah Voigt adds the title role of Ponchielli’s passionate La Gioconda to her collection of Met portrayals next season, on September 24. During the 2007-08 season, she sang the demanding soprano lead in Tristan und Isolde, which was transmitted live in HD around the world.
German soprano Diana Damrau lends her brilliant coloratura to two new roles at the Met next season: the title role in Lucia di Lammermoor, on October 3, and Gilda in Rigoletto, which opens on April 1. During the 2007-08 season, she sang the role of Konstanze in Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and was the first singer in Met history to sing both Pamina and the Queen of the Night in the same run of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte.
After her acclaimed portrayals last season of Sesto in La Clemenza di Tito and the title role in Iphigénie en Tauride, mezzo-soprano Susan Graham sings the role of Marguerite in La Damnation de Faust for the first time at the Met; the new production opens on November 7 and the matinee performance on November 22 will be part of The Met: Live in HD series. She also adds the soprano role of Donna Elvira in Mozart’s Don Giovanni to her Met repertory, beginning September 27.
Anna Netrebko sings the title role in Lucia di Lammermoor for the first time at the Met next season beginning January 26, as well as reprising the role of Mimì in La Bohème, which she has sung only once at the Met, two seasons ago. Her Lucia will be transmitted live in HD on February 7. In the 2007-08 season, the Russian soprano sang Juliette in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, also beamed live in HD around the world.
About Gallery Met
The Arnold & Marie Schwartz Gallery Met is a showcase for the contemporary works of art that reaffirms the company’s long history of relationships with major visual artists. Gallery Met, directed by Dodie Kazanjian since its inception in 2006, is made possible through a $1 million donation by Marie Schwartz, an Advisory Director on the Metropolitan Opera’s Board. Located in the south side of the lobby of the opera house, Gallery Met this season launched a new outdoor component of its exhibitions: artist-designed banners that hang on the façade of the opera house to coincide with new productions. This new program began with Barnaby Furnas’ evocative Final Flood III, announcing Peter Grimes, followed by Clemente’s banner for Satyagraha and the banner by George Condo for La Fille du Régiment closing out the season.
Gallery Met opened in September 2006 with Heroines, an exhibition of works inspired by the 2006-07 season's new productions. The artists represented included Cecily Brown, John Currin, Richard Prince, David Salle, Wangechi Mutu, and others.
Gallery Met’s first solo exhibition, Stage Fright by Argentinian artist Guillermo Kuitca, kicked off the 2007-2008 season, and was followed by Hansel and Gretel, presenting artists from The New Yorker and the contemporary art scene. The works, based on the Brothers Grimm story, were on display during the run of the new production of Humperdinck's fairy tale opera. In conjunction with the Met premiere of the Philip Glass opera Satyagraha this past spring, Gallery Met exhibited Chuck Close Philip Glass 40 Years, a selection of Close’s more than 100 portraits of his composer friend, created over a period of four decades.
Gallery Met will continue to expand its programs in 2008-09 by deepening its commitment to contemporary visual artists and introducing new ways to experience their work. For the first time at the Met, an artist will design original artwork for the fire screen, the 54’ by 54’ metal curtain that opera-goers will see when they come into the theater. The initial design, by celebrated artist Jeff Koons, will debut at the Met’s Opening Night Gala on September 22 and will remain on view throughout the season.