Heaven’s Gate
2022
s
Video Archive
Heaven's Gate is the latest in video artist Marco Brambilla's Megaplex series of video collages. A lavish and satirical take on the silver screen spectacle of Hollywood dreams and excesses, Heaven’s Gate both celebrates collective storytelling consciousness and satirizes its saturated glamour. The continuously looping video work ascends through the seven levels of Purgatory, each stage its own landscape of looping samples lifted from iconic moments of cinematic history.
(...) 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 feels at 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
High-definition 3D video, loop. Color, sound.
(...) 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 feels at 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
High-definition 3D video, loop. Color, sound.
sdfExhibitions & screenings
2022 Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam
Havana, Cuba
2022 PHI Center
Montreal, Canada
2021 Art Basel Miami
Miami, Florida
2021 The Standard
New York, New York
2021 Perez Art Museum Miami
Miami, Florida
2021 Frieze New York
New York, New York
Selected press
Artforum
Critics’ Picks: Marco Brambilla at Pérez Art Museum
The Art Newspaper
Maximalist magic: Marco Brambilla’s Heaven’s Gate plays the scale game in virtual reality
The Globe and Mail
Critics’ Picks: Heaven’s Gate at the Phi Centre
Whitewall
Marco Brambilla Decontextualizes Hollywood Icons At PAMM
Office Magazine
A Met Gala Installation: Heaven’s Gate
The Art Newspaper
Sneak a peek at Marco Brambilla’s new work Heaven’s Gate at Hudson
Yards
Miami New Times
Artist Marco Brambilla Unveils New Visual Piece at PAMM
NOWNESS
Video artist Marco Brambilla unpicks the Hollywood spectacle in a surreal installation satirizing the history of cinema
2022 Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam
Havana, Cuba
2022 PHI Center
Montreal, Canada
2021 Art Basel Miami
Miami, Florida
2021 The Standard
New York, New York
2021 Perez Art Museum Miami
Miami, Florida
2021 Frieze New York
New York, New York
Selected press
Artforum
Critics’ Picks: Marco Brambilla at Pérez Art Museum
The Art Newspaper
Maximalist magic: Marco Brambilla’s Heaven’s Gate plays the scale game in virtual reality
The Globe and Mail
Critics’ Picks: Heaven’s Gate at the Phi Centre
Whitewall
Marco Brambilla Decontextualizes Hollywood Icons At PAMM
Office Magazine
A Met Gala Installation: Heaven’s Gate
The Art Newspaper
Sneak a peek at Marco Brambilla’s new work Heaven’s Gate at Hudson
Yards
Miami New Times
Artist Marco Brambilla Unveils New Visual Piece at PAMM
NOWNESS
Video artist Marco Brambilla unpicks the Hollywood spectacle in a surreal installation satirizing the history of cinema