Guillermo Kuitca, Covent Garden VII, 2005, mixed media on paper

Actually, a curtain.

The Dallas Center for the Performing Arts announced that it’s chosen Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca to design the curtain for the Winspear Opera House. The DCPA has also acquired the artist’s Dallas Opera House (2008), one of his mixed media works on paper that use seating charts of such performance halls as La Scala and Covent Garden as basic material for colorful abstract designs.The Winspear curtain will continue in this line, abstracting the seating plan of the Winspear’s McDermott Performance Hall and reproducing the image on the curtain.

Interestingly, this announcement was already made last year in the December issue of Art in America. But according to the press rep for the DCPA, Kuitca had spoken to the magazine before it was completely certain that the transfer process would even work. Whether his curtain design could actually happen “wasn’t a done deal from our perspective.”

Although Kuitca has long been interested in performance and architecture, this will be his first curtain design. A major retrospective of Kuitca’s  work will premiere at the Miami Art Museum in October before heading across the country.