Metropolitan Opera Launches Short Films Series During HD
"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 Lučić in the title role and Anna Netrebko as his ruthlessly ambitious wife, on Saturday, October 11 at 12:55 p.m. ET." [Source] Watch the short film, and
see more video stills, after the jump. Pierpaolo Ferrari (1971) was born and raised in Milan where he developed his passion for photography and art. Since 1994 he specialized in advertising photography, collaborating with all major agencies like BBDO, McCann Erikson, DDB, Saatchi and Saatchi, Cheil Communication, Thompson and Wieden & Kennedy, working for brands like Nike, Audi, Mercedes, Vespa, Campari, BMW, Motorola, Sony, Rayban, Alfa Romeo, Heineken, MTV, Samsung, Biennale of Venice. His portrait for Campari has been chosen for the cover of Archive Magazine and he is one of the top 10 ranked photographer in the magazine. In 2006, with Federico Pepe, he realized Le Dictateur, a luxury art magazine, publishing personal artworks for best artists and photographers from all over the world. Currently he directed the
latest commercial for Emporio Armani and is now shooting celebrities for Uomo Vogue. He has received numerous awards from all the major festivals worldwide for many of his campaigns. Maurizio Cattelan was born in Padua, Italy, in 1960. Cattelan, who has no formal training and considers himself an "art worker" rather than an artist, has often been characterized as the court jester of the art world. This label speaks not only to his taste for irreverence and the absurd, but also his profound interrogation of socially ingrained norms and hierarchies, subjects historically only available to the court fool. Early in his career, Cattelan unleashed his mockery on figures in the art world. For Errotin, le vrai Lapin (1995) Cattelan convinced gallerist and notorious womanizer Emmanuel Lapin to wear a giant pink rabbit
costume shaped like a phallus to Cattelan's gallery opening. In 1998 a volunteer paraded around SITE Santa Fe donning an oversized papier-mâché caricatural Georgia O'Keefe costume; the same year, a similarly comical Pablo Picasso guise welcomed visitors to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Cattelan united humor with the macabre in his installations of taxidermy animals. The creatures were configured in absurdist narratives, like a post-suicide squirrel in Bidibidobidiboo (1996), as well as disarmingly familiar scenarios, like dogs curled up on the floor or perched on their haunches, seemingly still alive. In the late 1990s, Cattelan began to create hyper-realistic figural sculptures. The artist repeatedly employed his own image in works of self-mockery and self-effacement such as Mini-me (1999) and La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi (2000). Indeed, nobody was exempt from Cattelan's critique. In La Nona Ora (1999), a wax
replica of Pope John Paul II is seen struck down by a meteor and pinned to a red carpet. In Him (2001), a small simulation of Adolph Hitler kneels on the floor. Ave Maria (2007) reveals a line of saluting arms extending from the wall, recalling the fascist fervor that led to the Holocaust. In the more reverent, mournful piece All (2007), a series of marble sculptures that uncannily resemble dead bodies covered in sheets line the gallery floor. Solo exhibitions of Cattelan's work have been organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1998), Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (2000), Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam (2001), Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2001-3), P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York (2002), Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (2003), Musée du Louvre in Paris (2004), Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (2008), and The Menil Collection in Houston (2009). His work has also been featured in Venice Bienniale (1993, 1997, 1999, 2002, and 2003), L'hiver de l'amour at the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris (1994), SITE Santa Fe (1997), Manifesta 2 (1998), Istanbul Bieniali (1998), Kunsthalle Basel (1999), Whitney Biennial (2004),
Traces du Sacré at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (2008), and theanyspacewhatever at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2008). A retrospective of Cattelan's work opened in the fall of 2011 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Cattelan also founded The Wrong Gallery in 2002, a store window in New York City that allowed for a freedom of art interventions he found lacking in the commercial galleries. Cattelan lives and work in New York and Milan. [Source, Source]
