Enrique Martínez Celaya’s Monumental L.A. Opera Curtain Is Designed to Transform Before Your Eyes

Before the lights go down at any opera performance, there is the curtain—the barrier standing between the audience and whatever is about to happen. Tonight at the Los Angeles Opera, that familiar threshold will take on a new life in the hands of the Cuban-born artist Enrique Martínez Celaya, who created a monumental theatrical curtain that will rise and fall before every performance throughout the company’s upcoming 2026 to 2027 season.

A former scientist, Martínez Celaya is best known for a multidisciplinary practice spanning painting, sculpture, installation, and literature that explores questions of perception, memory, and meaning. That interest in how art can change our experience of a place caught the attention of L.A. Opera president and CEO Christopher Koelsch, who invited him to create “The Things We Know,” a 70-foot-wide curtain for the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Celaya wanted the piece to do more than serve as a backdrop: As it rose, its image would change, making the curtain’s movement part of the artwork.

“I’m very interested in the idea that anything I do can never be done anywhere else,” the artist told ELLE before the season’s opening performance on October 17. “So I started to think, well, what is special about a curtain that I would never have an opportunity to do in a museum?”

The word curtain feels almost too small for this project: Martínez Celaya’s work is part mural, part moving image. It opens on two children absorbed in their own small worlds—a girl with an aquarium, a boy watching a caged bird. Then stars, flowers, and fractured light come into view, before the scene slips into darkness. For a moment, the opera is still waiting.

“Half of the curtain is folded, so when you sit for 40 minutes, you’re looking at a certain version of the work, and that experience will change as the curtain begins to go up,” Martínez Celaya says. “There’s this evolution, where what you thought you were looking at is recontextualized. It gave me an opportunity to investigate things I could never do in a museum or in the other kinds of institutions I usually work with.”

The work continues Martínez Celaya’s brief but long-running dialogue with classical music: In 2004, he created “Schneebett” (“Snow Bed”), a sculptural installation for the Berlin Philharmonic inspired by Ludwig van Beethoven. “Ever since, I’ve been interested in working with music institutions, because I’m not a good musician at all,” he notes.

Martínez Celaya was also intentional about the curtain’s afterlife. Following the season’s final performance, the plan is to cut it into individual works, which will be sold to support future productions and initiatives. For the artist, the gesture offered a way to give back to an institution he admires.

“When I create my usual exhibitions, all the pieces go around the world and they’re never together again,” Martínez Celaya explains. “To take this curtain, cut it, and create individual paintings, to take this totality and fragment it, and now these pieces go around the world—there’s something very beautiful about that temporary quality of the experience. I also like the idea of giving back and being able to support an institution that I respect and that is doing something great for the city of Los Angeles.”