Maestro Arts is delighted to announce artist and director / designer Patrick Kinmonth's exhibition Et in Arcadia Ego. The exhibition will comprise a large selection of New Works on paper.

Patrick Kinmonth is an Anglo-Irish opera director and designer, described by Vogue Italia as “that rare thing, a true renaissance man”. He has worked as an artist in many disciplines, as writer and critic, architect, painter, designer and art director, and is known internationally as one of the most acclaimed set and costume designers for opera, photography and dance of his generation.

Kinmonth gained a first-class degree in English Language and Literature from Oxford University in 1977 and spent the following two years painting in Italy. He achieved international prominence as Arts Editor of British Vogue and subsequently as curator of landmark exhibitions of the photographs of Mario Testino, ‘Portraits’ at the National Portrait Gallery and ‘Diana, Princess of Wales’ at Kensington Palace among them. He has designed and curated two comprehensive retrospectives of Testino’s work, the first at Today Arts Museum in Beijing (June 2012) and the second at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (October 2012 – June 2013). As part of an ongoing sequence of exhibition installations for the Metropolitan Museum and others he has designed and co-curated the exhibition ‘Valentino: Master of Couture’ which opened at Somerset House in London in November 2012. He recently curated the exhibition ‘Making Dreams: Fendi and Cinema’ which opened at Cinema Manzoni in Milan in September 2013 and featured the short video film ‘Amphitheatre’ directed by Kinmonth and Antonio Monfreda.

In 1992 Kinmonth created his first stage and costume designs for opera and has subsequently designed over twenty new opera productions, from Teatro alla Scala, Milan to Matsumoto in Japan. His set and costume designs for Robert Carsen’s staging of La traviata graced the re-opening of Teatro La Fenice in 2004 and has become established as the theatre’s traditional season opener, being revived at the beginning of the 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 seasons. His designs for Wagner’s Ring cycle were created for Cologne Opera in 2004 and taken thereafter to La Fenice in Venice and for the work’s first performance in Shanghai. The production will now be seen at Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona - Das Rheingold opened in April 2013 and the cycle will unfold over the following four seasons. Further productions with Carsen include Semele and Die Zauberflöte (in Aixen- Provence, Vienna, London, Antwerp, Lyon and Zurich), as well as Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, Kát'a Kabanová and Jenůfa.

In 2008 Kinmonth made his debut as an opera director, conceiving a critically-acclaimed staging of Madama Butterfly for Cologne Opera. He directed and designed sets and costumes for Samson et Dalila at Deutsche Oper in Berlin in 2011, a production that was revived at the Grand Théâtre de Genève in 2012 and his production of Don Giovanni opened in Augsburg in 2012. A new production of Die Gezeichneten by Franz Schreker, directed and designed by Kinmonth, premiered at Cologne Opera in April 2013 to great critical acclaim. Forthcoming new productions include a staging of Haydn’s The Creation in London in December 2013 and a new production of Daphne for Toulouse Opera in June 2014. Future revivals include Madama Butterfly for Cologne Opera in September 2014 and Samson et Dalila at Deutsche Oper, Berlin in February 2015.

Kinmonth has collaborated with Anish Kapoor to design a production of Pelléas et Mélisande in Brussels, Rome and Barcelona for director Pierre Audi, with whom he has made productions in Stockholm, Amsterdam, Vienna and Paris, including Rameau’s Zoroastre and Castor et Pollux, the late madrigals of Monteverdi, and Handel’s Tamerlano and Alcina in Amsterdam, Drottningholm, Munich and Brussels. He has also worked with Audi on Vivaldi’s Orlando Furioso, supplying costume and set designs for stagings at Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris as well as in Nancy and Nice.

In 2010 he collaborated with the dancer and choreographer Fernando Melo to create a new dance theatre piece, A Guest House, for Gothenburg Ballet. Their partnership continued the following year with Fountain, a pioneering twenty-minute work of dance theatre piece written for and first performed at Munich’s Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz. Their most recent creative collaboration for Gothenburg Ballet, Tending to Fall, premiered in December 2012. Further ballet commissions include a new work with Fernando Melo for Norrdans in Sweden in March 2014 and Raymonda for Royal Swedish Opera in November 2014 with Pontus Lidberg.

Patrick Kinmonth’s many awards and honours include the Italian critics’ prize (Il Premio Abbiati) for best opera production for Káťa Kabanová at La Scala (2008) and for Götterdämmerung at La Fenice (2009), and the 2010 Prix des Pays Francophone for Elektra with Guy Joosten at La Monnaie in Brussels. He was nominated for an Olivier Award as part of English National Opera’s 1999 staging of Semele, while the DVD recording of Káťa Kabanová from Teatro Real Madrid, complete with Kinmonth’s set and costume designs, was shortlisted for the 2011 Gramophone Award for Best DVD Performance. In October 2012, Patrick Kinmonth was awarded Wall Street Journal magazine’s 2012 ‘Innovator of the Year Award’ for Design for his “unrestricted creativity and multiple talents as a set and costume designer, director, painter, author, decorator and exhibition curator.”