KAREN KILIMNIK BALLET SETS

The artist Karen Kilimnik is best known for her pop culture-flavored installations and Neo-Romantic celebrity portraits, but behind her seeming insistence on distilling the current Zeitgeist in her works runs a deep vein of historical influence. She has interpreted Paris Hilton as Marie Antoinette and Leonardo DiCaprio as a fairy-tale prince, and her latest venture—a series of sets for the latest premiere at the Paris Opéra Ballet—takes her even further back, to Greek mythology.

But ballet is less of a stretch for Kilimnik than might be expected. The art form has been a special interest of the artist’s for years, and her own ballet Sleeping Beauty and Friends was performed in London in 2007. “It is so graceful,” she explains of her long-running love for classical dance. She became involved with Psyché, which opened recently on a double bill with Serge Lifar’s rarely-seen Phèdre, after choreographer Alexei Ratmansky told the Paris Opéra he wanted to collaborate with a contemporary artist for his new piece, and was recommended Kilimnik.

“It was absolutely fantastic,” Kilimnik says about working with Ratmansky, one of today’s brightest ballet choreographers. His combination of tradition and contemporaneity proved a perfect match for her lush, evocative backdrops, a collection of painted works that harken back to the Romantic period and the birth of ballet. With sweeping, expansive brushstrokes, Kilimnik places the dancers in a moonlit forest, on the sprawling grounds of a grand château, among the clouds surrounded by cherubim. As in all of Kilimnik’s works, there is a certain wonder to the overwhelming beauty, a hint of fantasy mixed with a very modern grounding.

Psyché/Phèdre runs through Thursday at the Paris Opéra Ballet.

Photography courtesy of the Opéra national de Paris and 303 Gallery, New York.

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