King Size


2023




Commissioned for the opening of the MSG sphere in Las Vegas, King Size is a monumental 8K-resolution video collage that pays homage to the intertwined legacies of Elvis Presley and Las Vegas, examining their roles as metaphors for the American Dream's entropic trajectory. 

Spanning a 160,000-square-foot wraparound LED screen, the installation traces Elvis's transformation from a symbol of the American Dream to a figure emblematic of its excesses.

Through a dynamic assemblage of AI-generated and archival imagery, Brambilla crafts a visual narrative that mirrors the rise and metamorphosis of Las Vegas itself—from desert outpost to entertainment capital.

The work serves as both a tribute and a critique, examining the interplay between celebrity, spectacle, and the commodification of culture.



8K video projection, sound.


Selected press

The Art Newspaper
Going big: digital artists who show on a grand scale at immersive institutions

The Art Newspaper
Tipping point: how new immersive institutions are changing the world

The Art Newspaper
Elvis returns to Las Vegas in Marco Brambilla’s new video for the Sphere, created with AI

Whitewall
Marco Brambilla Animates the MSG Sphere for U2 Las Vegas Residency

TIME
Elvis Is Back in the Building, Thanks to AI—and U2

NOWNESS
King Size: Marco Brambilla celebrates Elvis Presley and the rise of Las Vegas in a digital exclusive, commissioned for the MSG Sphere

Designboom
KING SIZE: Marco Brambilla traces Elvis Presley's legacy in monumental video collage

Artnet News
Artist Marco Brambilla’s New A.I.-Generated Ode to Elvis Is Inaugurating Las Vegas’s Immersive Entertainment Venue, the Sphere

Billboard
How Visual Artist Marco Brambilla Scored a Song in U2’s Sphere Show

Wallpaper Magazine
How to conquer the Atomic City: the story behind U2 at the new Las Vegas Sphere

Rolling Stone Magazine
U2 Launch New Era of Live Music at Stunning Sphere Opening Concert in Las Vegas


The Orders


2023


j

Marco Brambilla’s The Orders transports the often mystified material culture of the Freemasonry into the digital realm.  The work is divided into three inreasingly complex phases, each representing a stage of the journey into enlightenment.

The Orders explores the role and importance of iconography, using Masonic tradition as a departure point for examining the ubiquity of symbols and associations in contemporary culture.





UPCOMING


Dresden


j

Dresden is a multi-channel video installation by Marco Brambilla that explores the themes of sensation, effect, and how the act of looking has been transformed by the current age of mediated images. The subject matter is specially significant given the current media landscape concerning the war in Ukraine, with its constant data streams on social media such as Twitter, Telegram, Instagram, etc

Brambilla’s installation juxtaposes two source materials, the first being footage of the Asisi panometer shot on location outside Dresden, an attraction which provides a 3600 panoramic facsimile of the bombing to visitors comprised of mostly German tourists. The second source is footage from the seminal 1972 science fiction film ‘SlaughterHouse-Five’ based on the book by Kurt Vonnegut, who experienced the horrors of the same bombing on the ground first-hand. Dresden seeks to amplify the surreal combination of the horrors of war with the conditions of a contemporary tourist attraction. The piece questions whether our present time, often dictated by consumerist fantasies and entertainment has diluted our ability to experience the true gravity of such events. By allowing the camera to play third party witness to an exchange between the present and past, Dresden crucially takes a step back to examine the treatment of devastation as spectacle; Compelling us to ask: to what degree are our emotions being mediated by present-day media and entertainment and are we no longer able to distinguish between fact and fiction?


Heaven’s Gate


2021


s

Video Archive








Heaven’s Gate is the fourth work in Brambilla’s Megaplex series, a vertically scrolling video collage that ascends through seven levels modeled on Dante’s Purgatory, reframed through the language of Hollywood spectacle. The continuous loop presents a densely layered panorama composed of imagery sourced from over 800 films, creating an immersive environment where archetypes, narratives, and eras collide.

The title references Michael Cimino’s 1980 film Heaven’s Gate, a production synonymous with cinematic ambition and excess. Brambilla’s reuse of the name draws a parallel between Cimino’s failed utopian vision and the cyclical dynamics of image-making and consumption within the entertainment industry.

Within the work, genre and chronology dissolve into a hyper-saturated vertical cascade, exploring the mechanisms by which cinema constructs collective memory and myth. Figures drift upward across domains of melodrama, fantasy, war, and apocalypse, recontextualized as part of a singular, recursive system of visual culture.

Heaven’s Gate has been presented in a range of formats, including as a monumental video wall at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, as a 360-degree architectural wrap on the exterior of the MSG Sphere in Las Vegas, and as a 12K immersive projection at Outernet Arts in London.


“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

2023 MSG Sphere
Las Vegas, Nevada

2023 Outernet Arts
London, UK

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