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.
