Marco Brambilla's exhibition Double Feature, which opened on October 11, 2024, takes us into a dazzling spectacle surrounding the Hollywood cult of glamour and fame.
Image gallery
Marco Brambilla, from Heaven’s Gate, 2022
Civilization Square Hell - Marco Brambilla
Marco Brombilla
In his two large-format video collages, Brambilla deconstructs familiar imagery to expose the empty promises of the "dream factory." His works simultaneously celebrate and caricature the excess of the entertainment industry and the fascination with it. The works from his Megaplex series challenge us to question traditional ideals and conventions.
The exhibition Double Feature takes up the nostalgic phenomenon of showing two films one after the other. Fotografiska presents both Brambilla's latest work Heaven's Gate (2022) and his first work in the series, Civilization (2008). Both works use the technique of video collage, which Brambilla first used in 2008 with Civilization.
Heaven's Gate (2022) takes viewers on a journey through the seven levels of purgatory, each depicted as a fantastical landscape with short film scenes from Hollywood's golden age repeated in endless loops. The work addresses aspects such as gaming, news, cinema and reality TV, which merge in a hyperreal parallel universe.
Civilization offers a psychedelic journey from hell to heaven, in which iconic film scenes are merged into a digital collage. This hyperrealistic world of clouds, meadows and burning cityscapes serves as a stage for the incessant production and consumption of media.
Brambilla describes his Megaplex series (including Civilization, Evolution, Creation and Heaven's Gate 2008-2021) as set between the birth and death of the universe. The visual overload makes it clear that the history of art and cinema is over - all previous styles are endlessly reproducible.
