You know when you reserve a ticket for the symphony and the seating chart pops up online? Ever consider that seating plan from the perfomer’s point of view, on stage? Ever consider it art?
Argentinian artist Guillermo Kuitca, whom I’d never heard of before yesterday, did consider it, and produced an oddly beautiful series of opera house seating plans as hybrid photograph-print-paintings, now on show as part of the Hirshhorn’s Everything exhibit.
The plans, which portray the world’s great opera houses including Covent Garden and La Scala, are warped, melted, inverted and exploded in bright colors, forcing the viewer to reimagine performance space and the meaning of audience from the stage outward.
Many of the pieces in Everything caught my attention–Kuitca also does wonderful things with maps–but the seating plans really got me. It’s a truly original idea, and I love that Kuitca traveled to many of the opera houses to research his subject.
In fact, it made me want to add opera houses to my itinerary when I travel. I’ve spent countless hours at the Kennedy Center and I visited Copenhagen’s spectacular new Opera House a few years ago, but I can’t think of any others I’ve experienced.
As for Kuitca, count me a fan.
Guillermo Kuitca: Everything–Paintings and Works on Paper, 1980-2008 runs through January 16, 2011 at the Hirshhorn.
