Dana Schutz's Götterdämmerung Opens 1/12 at Gallery Met

Artist Dana Schutz will open Götterdämmerung, a new exhibition presented in conjunction with the final opera in Wagner's epic Der Ring des Nibelungen, at the Arnold & Marie Schwartz Gallery Met on January 12. Schutz is the fourth and final artist in a series of leading contemporary talents commissioned to create Ring-themed artwork for Gallery Met. Each show coincides with a new production premiere of Robert Lepage's staging of the Ring cycle; Götterdämmerung, the final opera in the cycle, opens at the Met January 27 and runs through May 12.

Schutz, a young American artist, whose work may be seen in many major museums in America and Europe, including the Museum of Modern Art. She is particularly well-known for paintings which transcend genre boundaries, often juxtaposing whimsy and horror in provocative ways. Her breakthrough solo show Self Eaters and the People Who Love Them, in 2004, depicted a mythical race of self-cannibalizing people. In 2011, the Neuberger Museum of Art presented a selection from the first decade of Schutz's work. 

Götterdämmerung will feature black and white ink drawings and six large-scale colorful monotypes. One, entitled Brünnhilde, depicts the iconic heroine of the Ring cycle in her heroic (and suicidal) leap into a funeral pyre in the opera's concluding moments.

"Brünnhilde is a fascinating character, very powerful but conflicted. She takes the whole world down, as well as herself," Schutz says of Götterdämmerung's heroine, adding that Wagner's cycle of operas has no shortage of appealing artistic subjects. "There's so much in the Ring: Rhinemaidens, a dragon, incest--even the world in flames!"

Schutz is the fourth contemporary artist Gallery Met Director Dodie Kazanjian has asked to create a Ring-themed exhibition. Earlier installments presented by Gallery Met are Peter Doig's Siegfried + Poster Project, seen in fall 2011, and last season's Notations After the Ring (by Julie Mehretu) and Wagner (by Elizabeth Peyton.)

"I've been looking at Dana's work since 2002, when she was a graduate student at Columbia," Kazanjian said. "She constantly surprises you with startling images that shed new and often disturbing light on the human condition. Her take on Wagner was something I really wanted to see."

Gallery Met, located in the south lobby of the opera house, is open to the public Mondays through Fridays from 6 p.m. to the end of the last intermission and Saturdays from noon to the end of the evening performance's last intermission. Admission is free and no appointments are required. Gallery Met is closed on Sundays.

Robert Lepage's new production of Götterdämmerung will premiere January 27 with Met Principal Conductor Fabio Luisi leading a cast that includes Deborah Voigt as Brünnhilde, Wendy Bryn Harmer as Gutrune, Waltraud Meier as Waltraute, Jay Hunter Morris as Siegfried, Iain Paterson as Gunther, Eric Owens as Alberich, and Hans-Peter König as Hagen. The first complete cycles of Lepage's Ring staging will begin performances in April.
For more information on the Met's contemporary visual arts initiatives, which are organized by Dodie Kazanjian, please visit www.metopera.org/gallerymet.

About Gallery Met
The Arnold & Marie Schwartz Gallery Met, located in the opera house lobby's south side, 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 an initial $1 million donation by Marie Schwartz, an Advisory Director on the Metropolitan Opera's Board.

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, George Condo, John Currin, Barnaby Furnas, Richard Prince, David Salle, and others. Gallery Met's first solo exhibition, Stage Fright by Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca, kicked off the 2007-08 season, followed by Hansel and Gretel, featuring 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 during the 2008-2009 season, Gallery Met exhibited 18 portraits by Chuck Close of his composer friend in the exhibition Chuck Close Philip Glass 40 Years. That summer, Gallery Met presented eight portraits by Francesco Clemente in an exhibition called The Sopranos. The exhibition featured portraits of the divas who figured prominently in the Met's 2008-09 season, with a hardcover catalog of Francesco Clemente: The Sopranos available in bookstores. Also in 2008-9, Gallery Met presented a solo exhibition by Canadian artist David Altmejd, coinciding with the premiere of John Adams's opera Doctor Atomic, followed by the exhibition From the Met to the Met: Anselm Kiefer and Wagner's "Ring". In the first collaboration between the Metropolitan Opera and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wagner-inspired works by contemporary artist Anselm Kiefer were shown to coincide with the revival of Otto Schenk's production which was making its final run at the opera house. The 2009-10 season opened with the Tosca-inspired exhibition Something About Mary, which showcased works about Mary Magdalene by 14 contemporary artists including Paul Chan, Marlene Dumas, Kiki Smith, George Condo, and John Currin. In 2010, William Kentridge's Ad Hoc: Works for The Nose opened at Gallery Met in conjunction with the Met premiere of Shostakovich's The Nose in a production directed by the artist. Last season, a four-artist series of works inspired by Der Ring des Nibelungen opened with Notations After the Ring by Julie Mehretu and continued with Elizabeth Peyton's Wagner, the first Gallery Met show to extend beyond the boundaries of the gallery and into the opera house itself, and Peter Doig's Siegfried + Poster Project.

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