The BNE dresses up theater, film and ballet with an exhibition dedicated to costume designer Pedro Moreno

The National Library of Spain (BNE) and the National Museum of Performing Arts (MNAE) presented the exhibition this Thursday ‘Pedro Moreno. For your dome. Theatrical and cinematographic art’ which invites the visitor to enter the creative universe of costume designer Pedro Moreno with an immersive exhibition that traces his career in film, theater and ballet through drawings, sketches, fabrics, colors, textures and some of his most emblematic creations.

The exhibition, of which Pedro Moreno himself is curator, not only seeks to publicize his artistic production, but also to reveal the details of his creative processes. Five mannequins dressed in period costumes welcome the public from a theatrical stage installed in the BNE lobby, before giving way to the Hipóstila Room, where an audiovisual installation with images of the artist invites you to discover “his house”, as he himself defines it in the audiovisual pieces that accompany the exhibition tour.

The exhibition is structured around the milestones that marked Moreno’s artistic conception and presents a journey from the projects conceived in his workshop to the final result on stage or screen. In the so-called ‘Testimonial ring’several representative pieces of his work are accompanied by audiovisual conversations with performers and creators such as Emma Suárez, Ana Belén, Víctor Ullate or José Carlos Plaza, who recall the characters and montages for which the designer created the costumes.

The National Library, an institution to which Pedro Moreno has bequeathed part of his work, hosts the exhibition as a symbolic return of the artist whom he considers his “second house” and an essential source of documentation for your research on historical clothing.

The route is divided into two spaces differentiated by color: one redwhich represents the intimacy of the creative process and work in the workshop, and another black that recreates the stage box of a theater or the darkness of a movie theater, where creations come to life before the audience. As the exhibition explains, this duality symbolizes the transformation of the first sketches into finished costumes.

The exhibition incorporates various interactive elements to involve the visitor in the artist’s creative process. In the so-called ‘Wall of Senses’the public can touch different fabrics while Pedro Moreno explains on a screen the dramatic use of materials such as silk, cotton, wool or velvet. Another panel allows you to discover the narrative meaning of different colors through examples taken from his works for film and theater.

Likewise, the ‘Labor Chamber’ recreates the costumer’s studio, with a projection of his career and a sketch that is drawn in real time on the work table, while the ‘Chamber of Dreams’ immerses the visitor in a dreamlike space in which the artist himself reflects on inspiration and muses, accompanied by an audiovisual experience that reproduces the imaginative process of his designs.

The tour concludes with some of the creations born from that creative process, among them the recreation of a thuriferary angel designed for the exhibition ‘Saints of Zurbarán. Devotion and persuasion’, held in Seville in 2013, in addition to a corridor in which figurines from different periods accompany the visitor to the exit.