Marco Brambilla

When people haven’t woke up from Marco Brambilla’s work paying homage to the rock legend Elvis Presley shown during legendary U2 concert for the opening of the massive Madison Square Garden Sphere in Las Vegas, the dream has come to reality. Marco Brambilla’s Double Feature will be presented for the first time in China in collaboration with Fotografiska. The exhibition will be exhibited at the Fotografiska Shanghai from June 22th to October 7th, 2024.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Renowned for his intricate recontextualizations of popular imagery and pioneering use of digital imaging technologies, video artist Marco Brambilla's captivating Megaplex series’ video collages invite audiences on a thought-provoking journey to explore the boundaries of pop culture.The video works use video collages of classical Hollywood films to create new meanings and explore tensions between reality and illusion. Assembled in gigantic video projections, the works create a whole new immersive cinematographic experience.

Double Feature echoes the nostalgic practice of a long discontinued motion picture industry phenomenon; the programming of two films instead of the modern single-feature screening. The exhibition unveils two extraordinary pieces that showcase Brambilla's mastery of visual storytelling and digital art through his Megaplex series; Heaven’s Gate (2022) and King Size (2023).

Marco Brambilla is both an artist and a full-feature film director, an experience which he gained while working in Hollywood and which now transpires in much of his further artist work. Known for his elaborate re-contextualization of popular imagery, as well as his pioneering use of digital imaging technologies in video installation and art, Brambilla is devoted to exploring the history and influence of pop culture, or how images commodify human experiences through over-saturation.

His creative themes mainly concentrate on consumerism concepts, popular images and human history, collective storytelling consciousness.

Heaven's Gate, 2022

Heaven's Gate is one of the latest works in Marco Brambilla's Megaplex series of video collages.It takes its title from the 1980 Michael Cimino period epic that became known for its excess (the uncontrolled production costs of Cimino’s film bankrupted United Artists). Marco Brambilla takes lavish and satirical scenes from famous Hollywood’s films. The visual references in “Heaven’s Gate” are derived from Hollywood’s golden-age and include samples from iconic moments of cinematic history. The continuously looping video work ascends through the seven levels of Purgatory, each stage has its own landscape of looping samples. The work reappropriates the language of pop culture to depict the tensions present in religion, industry, and celebrity: ascension and fall, innocence and experience, vanity and pageantry, sexuality and awakening, simplicity and excess. These iconic moments of cinematic history represent a form of collective storytelling, satirizing the hyper-saturation of imagery while leading to sensory overload.

Heaven's Gate takes viewers on an alluring journey through the spectacle of Hollywood dreams and excesses. Employing state-of-the-art digital compositing technology, Brambilla creates a satirical experience that re-contextualizes film samples and fantastical set pieces into infinitely looping memes. This immersive installation challenges our perception of gaming, news, reality TV, and Hollywood, offering a glimpse into a hyper-sensory parallel universe.

King Size, 2023

The other artwork King Size presents a visual meditation on the intertwined legacies of Elvis Presley and Las Vegas, examining their roles as metaphors for the American Dream's entropic trajectory. The piece symbolically ascends from the Nevada desert to a futuristic Vegas Metropolis, reflecting the transformation of Elvis from a popular entertainer to a mythic figure and Las Vegas from a desert town to the apex of American consumerism and entertainment.

The four-minute continuous loop video, employs looping film samples and AI-generated imagery to create a surreal upward scrolling tableau. The piece symbolically ascends from the Nevada desert to a futuristic Vegas Metropolis, reflecting the transformation of Elvis from a popular entertainer to a mythic figure and Las Vegas from a desert town to the apex of American consumerism and entertainment. From recontextualizing familiar images of Elvis, delving into the constructed realities of fame and stardom, the work express the notion that our perceptions of celebrity are often only shaped by media fabrications.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Marco Brambilla is a London-based artist known for his elaborate re-contextualization 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 and is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum (New York); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Perez Museum (Miami) among many others.

Brambilla has presented several public art installations, including his Nude Descending Staircase No.3 presented at the Oculus world trade center in New York, Heaven’s Gate presented at The Sphere in Las Vegas, and presentations at New York Times Square’s Midnight Moment series of both Apollo XVIII in 2015, and The Approximations of Utopia in 2024.

His work has been featured at the Venice Film Festival and Sundance Film Festivals, as well as Foundation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland.