"The Magic Flute:" Lisa Zwerling's paintings inspired by Mozart's Opera
October 2 – 27, 2012
Opening Reception October 4th, 6 – 8
Throughout history, artists have been inspired by music. Now, Lisa Zwerling has created a series of 38 paintings inspired by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s operatic fantasy The Magic Flute. For Zwerling, who usually paints in series, The Magic Flute is her most extensive and concentrated.
The Magic Flute is a fusion of personal tales of love and loss and of Masonic philosophy about values and wisdom. Zwerling makes both parts intimate with a keen interest in psychology and an expressive style. Zwerling’s paintings explore the emotional flowering of the opera’s characters as they set forth on an enchanted quest to rescue a princess and reach a state of enlightenment. The Magic Flute offers an abundance of visual inspiration including magic bells and a magic flute, child spirits, trials of fire and water, a dragon, a vengeful queen with a high F note, comedic characters bedecked in feathers, and enchanted villains.
Though the paintings create a continuous narrative, and in a rejection of the same sized grid, each is a different size and shape, in a staccato visual play. Zwerling does this to keep the viewer involved, just as film moves back and forth between distance and close-up. A thread of repeated color weaves throughout as a leitmotif. Music and dance have been essential to Zwerling, a former dancer with professional musicians in the family.
To view an electronic press kit of the paintings in this series, visit: http://db.tt/REzaotls
In a unique fusion of art and music, The Opera Company of Brooklyn will perform The Magic
Flute in concert form on October 24th at 8:00 PM at the gallery. Lisa Zwerling’s paintings, in conjunction with this exclusive performance, will give fans the opportunity to experience a new visual interpretation of the opera.
For ticket reservations, visit: www.operabrooklyn.org. Tickets are available for $60.
The exhibition will be on view at FIRST STREET GALLERY, 526 West 26th Street, Suite 209,
New York, NY. Gallery hours: 11 AM to 6 PM, Tuesday to Saturday. Phone: 646-336-8053
About Lisa Zwerling
Lisa Zwerling’s 14th one-person show is coming up in October 2012. In 2000, the Frye Art Museum in Seattle exhibited 23 paintings and published a catalogue with an essay by Robert Rosenblum. Her work is in collections including the Frye Art Museum, the Bayly Museum, the LaSalle University Art Museum, New York University, and in private collections in the US, Europe, South Africa, and Korea. Zwerling has received three Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants and an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant and was a visiting artist at The American Academy in Rome. Zwerling was educated at Sarah Lawrence College (BA), Cooper Union (BFA), and New York University (MA). She has taught at Princeton and Pratt and currently at NYU where she is an Adjunct Full Professor.
For more information, visit: www.lisazwerling.com
About Opera Company of Brooklyn
Opera Company of Brooklyn (OCB) was founded in 2000 to train and promote talented young vocal artists while providing affordable and accessible opera to New York City communities. OCB seeks take opera out of its traditionally large and formal spaces and presents it directly to the mainstream public. These smaller, intimate settings provide audiences with close proximity to the singers, conductor, and musicians, creating an engaging experience for all. OCB also oversees a Resident Artist Program (RAP), a thriving educational experience in which artists, chosen by a juried competition, learn operatic roles as well as performance and staging skills.
More information at: www.operabrooklyn.org
