LAS VEGAS, NEV.- Marco Brambilla's striking video collage, Heaven's Gate, is on view at the Sphere in Las Vegas. Following his acclaimed Elvis Presley tribute with KING SIZE in September 2023, Brambilla now brings to the Sphere this monumental work. From December 1st, 2023, to February 18th, 2024, Heaven’s Gate is being displayed on the Sphere's external LED facade in a captivating 360-degree format.

Heaven’s Gate, a recent addition to Brambilla's Megaplex series, is a grandiose and satirical portrayal of Hollywood's cinematic fantasies and extravagances. It simultaneously celebrates and critiques the allure of collective storytelling. The artwork, in a perpetual loop, takes viewers through seven levels of Purgatory, each layer rich with looping scenes from iconic film moments.

In his essay, Marco Brambilla’s Labyrinth of Labyrinths, art critic Daniel Birnbaum delves into Brambilla's use of digital technology to confront and question societal and cultural standards. Heaven’s Gate reflects these themes, presenting a surreal and complex visual journey.

(...) In the work, Brambilla makes visible the concomitant tensions present in religion, industry and celebrity, ascension and fall, innocence and experience, vanity and pageantry, sexuality and awakening, simplicity and excess. Speaking the language of Hollywood’s dream factory, it communicates a nostalgia that feelsnat once familiar and uncanny and seemingly appropriate to the mood of 2020, where media saturation created a convergence of fact and fiction in a voracious cycle of introspection and collective anxiety. Heaven’s Gate likewise unravels into a dreamlike spectacle of virtual chaos. The work produces an overpowering labyrinth of labyrinths, a sinuous spreading visual maze seems to encompass the past and the future. In some way it involves stars.

---Marco Brambilla’s Labyrinth of Labyrinths
essay by Daniel Birnbaum

This unique blend of history and imagination, reality and fantasy, positions Heaven's Gate as more than a visual spectacle. It's a voyage through the collective psyche, uniquely envisioned and brought to life by Brambilla.

Brambilla (b. 1960, Milan, Italy) works and lives in London and Paris. He has held solo exhibitions in museums and institutions around the world and is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum (New York); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; ARCO Foundation (Madrid); and the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington D.C). Notable shows include New Museum, New York; Santa Monica Museum of Art (Retrospective); Seoul Biennial, Korea; Broad Art Museum; and Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul; Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland. Brambilla has worked with Creative Time and Art Production Fund in New York to present public art installations, including his Nude Descending Staircase No.3 (2019) presented at Oculus WTC by Art Production Fund during Frieze New York. Brambilla is a recipient of the Tiffany Comfort Foundation and Tiffany Colbert Foundation awards. His work has been featured at the Venice Film Festival and Sundance Film Festivals, as well as Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland.