Sebastian Magnani’s Overtures – Cat’s Escape (2023, Archival Pigment Print) stages an opulent encounter between pop-cultural fantasy and the grandeur of European high culture. Seated in the red velvet curves of an ornate opera house, Catwoman reclines with an air of confidence and detachment, a champagne glass poised delicately in her hand. The surrounding architecture, with its gilded ornamentation and baroque extravagance, envelops her figure, casting her both as an intruder and as a natural inhabitant of this luxurious world.

The tension lies in the juxtaposition. Magnani places a figure drawn from comic-book mythology into a setting coded with centuries of refinement, tradition, and spectacle. Catwoman’s glossy latex suit gleams against the velvet seats, her presence unsettling the formality of the opera’s ritualized space. The image functions as both parody and critique, questioning hierarchies of culture by blending the popular with the elite, the fictional with the real.

As part of the Cat’s Escape series, Overtures extends Magnani’s exploration of identity and archetype by positioning an anti-heroine in unexpected environments. The result is at once glamorous and subversive, a portrait of rebellion wrapped in elegance, where fantasy unsettles tradition and the audience is invited to imagine new stories unfolding in old spaces.