AMSTERDAM.- Nxt Museum to present Marco Brambilla’s first show in the Netherlands with two video collages from his Megaplex series: Heaven’s Gate (2021) and Creation (2012). These grand-scale digital masterpieces follow on from his presentation of King Size (2023) a visual meditation on the intertwined legacies of Elvis Presley and Las Vegas, showcased at The Sphere in Las Vegas.

Brambilla’s Heaven’s Gate and Creation will illuminate the Nxt Stage of Amsterdam's Nxt Museum, from today to May 28, 2024.

« Brambilla, who is Italian but based between London and Paris, has been a long time pioneer of video, digital imaging, V.R. and other emerging technologies. These projects have often been characterized by their wry satirization of capitalism, our image-saturated world, and the frenzied obsession with celebrity. » Artnet News, 28 September, 2023

By appropriating the language of the Hollywood epic, I wanted to confront the viewer with a glossy reflection of humanity’s perpetual quest for material gain. The epic nature of this presentation fully embraces the element of spectacle, inhabiting a hyper-sensory parallel universe where the lines between gaming, news, reality TV and Hollywood are part of the same human epic.” -Marco Brambilla, speaking about Heaven’s Gate

Arising from his experience in Hollywood filmmaking, Brambilla's work explores the history and influence of pop culture through the lens of Guy Debord's "spectacle," or how images commodify human experiences by over-saturation. These mesmerising and seamless collage works use scenes, characters and images from films to create elaborate video collages, dealing broadly with "transition, our culture's constant acceleration and emotional connection and disconnection through technology." In this respect, Brambilla satirises mass media, which "can be interpreted as apocalyptic or Utopian in nature."

Heaven’s Gate

Scale is at the heart of Brambilla's Heaven's Gate: as Brambilla says it is "a video monument to Hollywood’s veneration of glamour"..."while retelling the history of the world in seven distinct phases". In his complex, looping, immersive artwork, Brambilla uses existing footage to create a digital tableau as a human figure ascends through seven stages of life, a parallel to the mountainous seven levels of Dante's Purgatory.

Encasing a dark room, the imagery comprises a mind-blowing quantity of movie scenes, sets, and characters [(over 800) that have been digitally cropped and re-contextualised into contiguous animated dreamscapes. Multilayered moments from some of cinema’s most iconic productions—Metropolis (1927), Rocky (1976), Jurassic Park (1993), King Kong (specifically, the 1976 and 2005 remakes)—repeat continually, producing an epic celluloid tapestry. The astounding compositional detail, symmetry and a thunderous soundtrack sampled from 10-15 different sources, create an impression of tuning through different radio stations as you ascend through the film, compounding the work’s grandiose, hypnotic effect.

Creation

Similarly Creation from 2012 is set between the birth and death of the universe, depicting an abstract cycle of life within spiralling DNA strands in the form of a cosmic pull back. The big bang is followed by embryonic inception, an idyllic Garden of Eden, then decadent urban sprawls eventually giving way to a landscape of annihilation before reconstituting itself as the spiral loops back to the moment of origin.

Disembodied depictions from well-known movies and even the Hollywood sign itself are sucked into a vortex; loops from 350-400 films and about 2000 objects revolve balletically to Prokofiev’s “Cinderella Waltz". “Most people have seen the films from which my pieces are derived, so it taps into their collective consciousness,” says Brambilla. “The waltz structure felt appropriate since everything is in constant motion, orbiting and circling—and Prokofiev has a wonderful sense of madness.”

In his works, 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, he communicates a nostalgia that feels at once familiar and uncanny and seemingly appropriate to the mood of today, where media saturation has created a convergence of fact and fiction in a voracious cycle of introspection and collective anxiety.

“I'm delighted that Heaven's Gate will be shown in Amsterdam. This will be an entirely unique presentation of the work, taking advantage of the state-of-the-art media space at Nxt Museum.”, quotes Marco Brambilla.

Founder and Director of Nxt Museum, Merel van Helsdingen adds: "After witnessing Marco's work 'Heavens Gate' at the Outernet in London and seeing the documentation of his work on The Sphere in Las Vegas I could not be more excited and proud to present the work for the first time in The Netherlands at Nxt Museum on our beloved immersive canvas in Nxt Stage"

Marco Brambilla

Marco Brambilla (b.1960, Milan) is a London-based artist known for his elaborate recontextualizations of popular and found imagery, as well as his pioneering use of digital imaging technologies in video installation and art.

Brambilla’s work has been internationally exhibited, most recently in The Sphere in Las Vegas and the Outernet in London. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum (New York); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; ARCO Foundation (Madrid); CENTQUATRE-PARIS (Paris); Kunsthalle Vogelmann (Germany); 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 presented at the Oculus world trade centre during Frieze New York. Notable collaborations include 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, an opera by Marina Abramović first presented at the Opéra National de Paris, France; and Pélleas et Mélisande, presented by the Opera Vlaanderen in Antwerp, Belgium.

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.

Nxt Museum
Preview evening: Wednesday 28 February, 2024 at 6:00PM