The Met's Gallery Met Shorts Series Launches Today with MACBETH

The Met will expand its visual arts initiatives with a new series of short films, Gallery Met Shorts, in which celebrated visual artists use animation, video, and film to create original artworks set to music from operas in the Met's current season. Each short film will be shown in movie theaters around the world during the intermission of a corresponding live performance from the Met's Live in HD series, which is now seen in 69 countries. The first short, set to music from the Act I finale of Verdi's Macbeth, is by artist Maurizio Cattelan and photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari as part of their ongoing Toiletpaper project, which also includes the irreverent art magazine of the same title. Their film will be shown at intermission of the live transmission of Macbeth, which stars Željko Lu?i? in the title role and Anna Netrebko as his ruthlessly ambitious wife, today, October 11 at 12:55 p.m. ET.

Additional shorts in the series will include works by George Condo, tied to Bizet's Carmen (November 1); T.J. Wilcox, tied to Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann (January 31); Paul Chan, tied to Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle, which will be transmitted in a double bill with Tchaikovsky's Iolanta on February 14; and a fifth film, featuring music from Leoncavallo's Pagliacci (April 25), for which an artist will be announced at a later date.

Dodie Kazanjian, who has organized the Met's visual arts initiatives since 2006, created the series to expand Gallery Met's connection to the opera company's offerings.

"The idea was to connect contemporary art and artists more directly with what happens onstage at the Metropolitan Opera," Kazanjian said.

The Met also presents work by contemporary artists in Gallery Met, a space in the opera house's south lobby. Gallery Met 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. The current Gallery Met show is FIGARO/Peter Saul, an EXHIBITION of five original paintings by the iconoclastic artist presented on the occasion of the Met's new production of Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro.

For more information on the Met's contemporary visual arts initiatives, 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. In the 2010-11 and 2011-12 seasons, a four-artist series of works inspired by Der Ring des Nibelungen opened: Notations After the Ring by Julie Mehretu; Elizabeth Peyton's Wagner; Peter Doig's Siegfried + Poster Project; and Dana Schutz's Götterdämmerung. In the 2012-13 season, Gallery Met presented Ariel and Other Spirits, a show by David Salle presented on the occasion of the Met premiere of Thomas Adès's The Tempest, and George Condo's Jesters, presented in conjunction with the premiere of a new staging of Verdi's Rigoletto. The 2013-14 season began with Two Boys, an EXHIBITION of four photographs by Laurie Simmons, shown in conjunction with the Met premiere of Nico Muhly's opera. In 2014, the largest EXHIBITION in Gallery Met history, Imaginary Portraits: Prince Igor opened and featured portraits of the medieval Russian ruler by more than 20 artists, including Peter Doig, John Baldessari, Ragnar Kjartansson, Michael Williams, and Dana Schutz.

About The Met: Live in HD - The 2014-15 season of The Met: Live in HD features 10 live transmissions of select Saturday matinees to movie theaters around the world. The HD season opens on October 11 with Macbeth and continues with Le Nozze di Figaro (October 18), Carmen (November 1), Il Barbiere di Siviglia (November 22), Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (December 13), The Merry Widow (January 17), Les Contes d'Hoffmann (January 31), Iolanta and Bluebeard's Castle (February 14), La Donna del Lago (March 14), and Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci (April 25). The Peabody and Emmy Award-winning series of live transmissions into movie theaters, which enters its ninth season in 2014-15, currently reaches more than 2,000 theaters in 69 countries. The Met's groundbreaking series launched in 2006 and quickly became the world's leading alternative cinema content provider. More than 15 million tickets have been sold since the series' inception.

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