Each year since 1998, Austria’s Museum in Progress has chosen a world-renowned artist to transform the large central curtain (known as the “Safety Curtain”) in the Vienna State Opera building into a work of art. The nonprofit art initiative transforms the fire protection wall between the stage and the auditorium of the Vienna State Opera into a temporary exhibition space for contemporary art. The artwork is on view for the audience before and after performances and during intermissions.

Anselm Kiefer Safety Curtain

For the latest, the 26th iteration of the curtain, the jury (Daniel Birnbaum, Bice Curiger and Hans-Ulrich Obrist) selected the artist Anselm Kiefer whose work is an homage to Polish author Stanislaw Lem’s book Solaris. Read on to learn more and to see the some of the previous curtain designs as well.

Anselm Kiefer’s Solaris

Anselm Kiefer has disguised the curtain in the Vienna palace used for the Performing Arts with a painting juxtaposing the world of opera with a cosmic narrative. The painting, inspired by a novel by Polish author Stanislaw Lem, shares its title with the book: Solaris.

According to Lem’s story, Solaris is an exoplanet, tracing its elliptical orbit around two suns thousands of light years away in the distant future, that poses an insoluble puzzle for Terran scientists, even though they uncovered the last secrets of quantum physics generations ago.

Christoph Ransmayr, in an article for the Museum in Progress, says that Solaris appears to have just one inhabitant, weighing many billions of tonnes and covering most of the planet’s surface in the form of an ocean flowing around islands and archipelagos. Sometimes gleaming like glass, at others billowing and roaring beneath an unusual fog, next gelatinous or a glowing viscous mass like lava, the ocean shifts into symmetrical or asymmetrical shapes, rising and solidifying in clouds or sinking back like a swell of quicksilver…

…And this ocean, which can swallow up whole worlds and spit them out again, which is so monstrous and so omniscient that it can recreate and imitate everything that humans can achieve and seems to have the ability to remember everything, this very ocean is now rolling in long waves out of Kiefer’s painting into the dark rows filled by an audience that came here expecting just to see an opera. (source)

Because of its quality, its year-long existence and its dimensions (176 m²), the Safety Curtain enables a distinctive perspective of art history for the past twenty-five years and serves as a symbolic link between performance and visual arts.

Here are are some of our past favorites:

See all the past versions here

all images and information courtesy of Work In Progress