Sarah Kirk Hanley writes about the exhibition Götterdämmerung at the Arnold and Marie Schwartz Gallery Met, New York, on view through May 12, 2012.

Kirk Hanley writes: "Schutz’s own extravagantly creative and somewhat outlandish imagination, as well as her exuberantly gestural style, is well-matched to Wagner's outsized narrative and grandiloquent score. Yet the artist took the assignment as a general guideline, noting, '…I worked only loosely from the themes in Götterdämmerung. Most of the images came from drawings in the studio. After drawing for many hours you start to forget the story and focus on the specifics of how to make an image work. I hadn’t seen the production at the Met Opera before I started making the work so that made it easier to imagine what these characters could look like and be doing' "