Tour david hockney’s immersive opera stage designs
Inside the immersive opera stage designs of artist David Hockney lie imagined worlds filled with vibrant colors, ‘forced’ perspective, and 3D spaces. Since the 1970s, the artist has designed sets and costumes for productions at some of the largest opera houses in the United States and Europe. These are not collaborations where he provided a sketch and left it for the in-house production team to realize. They are complete visual environments: painted backdrops, dimensional scenery, and costume schemes. All of them are built from the same spirit of colors and perspectives that run through his paintings and that he sees, but the difference is that the canvas is a stage, the scale is architectural, and the audience sits inside the work. In this way, actors perform within his artworks.
In 2027, viewers are afforded to revisit his fantastical opera stage designs, as Tate Modern has announced that in the summer next year, the Turbine Hall is set to host a multimedia installation built around this body of work. The Turbine Hall has a roof with 524 glass panes, and the productions David Hockney designed for the stage will be projected onto vast screens inside it, enveloping the visitors into his operatic world. The installation marks his 90th birthday, and at the same period as the exhibition, there’s a separate career-spanning retrospective of over 200 works that is bound to open at Tate Britain in October 2027 and run through February 2028.
Tristan und Isolde | all images courtesy of Los Angeles Opera
Forced perspectives and colors set the scenographies
The immersive opera stage designs of artist David Hockney start with color used as structures. For Tristan und Isolde, the Wagner production he first designed in 1987, blue carries the production from beginning to end. Tristan wears blue. The sky and the cliff that defines the stage’s forced perspective are blue. When a surface glows in one color, the moments where another color appears stand out and catch the eye’s attention. Isolde’s red costume then shines through without needing to highlight it. It’s already the color blue that does this work.
Forced perspective is the other tool David Hockney brings from his painting practice to his opera stage designs, which viewers can start to feel and experience during his multimedia exhibition at Tate Modern in 2027. It is a technique that makes objects appear either closer or further from the viewer than their physical position, and on a stage, where the audience looks at a fixed plane from a fixed distance, it allows a designer to create the feeling of depth without physical depth. In the Tristan und Isolde designs, a cliff edge sits at the center of the stage and appears to look out over a void. The horizon feels unreachable, and the stage feels larger than it is.
set design for Tristan und Isolde
Multimedia exhibition of the artist in tate modern
For Die Frau ohne Schatten – Richard Strauss’s 1919 fantasy opera, which David Hockey designed in 1992 – the approach shifts because the sets fill the stage with patterns. Orbs sit embedded in the scenery, and texture appears across surfaces. One of the main characters is a fabric dyer by trade, and the production shows just that with a visual density that the Wagner set doesn’t have. Where Tristan is a study in open space and melancholy blue, Die Frau is a demonstration of how much a stage can hold.
Many of David Hockney’s immersive opera stage designs are set to be brought and projected to Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall installation. It won’t be a concert or a live production, but a space where those designs surround the visitor, immersing them digitally just as their physical counterparts have done. The Hall has already housed a steel spider, a crack in the floor, a series of enormous metal sunflower seeds, and a weather installation that produced fog. In summer 2027, it is set to become what it has not been before: an opera house without a stage.
set design of Turandot
all these sets are built from the same spirit of colors and perspectives that run through the artist’s paintings
view of Die Frau ohne Schatten’s set
project info:
artist: David Hockney | @david_hockney
museum: Tate Modern | @tate
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