SELECTED WORKS

NUDE DESCENDING A STAIRCASE NO. 3

Nude Descending a Staircase No.3 moves the iconic Duchamp painting (Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2) into the dimension of time.

The illusion of movement in the painting is explored as layers of figures collaged onto a panoramic digital canvas constantly reconfigure themselves to cascade down an unseen stairway.

The figures, shapes and color palette are pure cubism, now expanded into three dimensions using state-of-the-art machine- learning technology. The original 1912 “Nude Descending a Staircase No.2” is a rare case where an artist originally drew from a “new” technology (Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic time-studies) as an inspiration for a painting.

By taking the original Duchamp painting back into the technological realm and adding the dimension of time, Brambilla completes the circle and pays homage to the deconstructed image using a wholly contemporary visual language.

INSTALLATIONS

2020 - Outernet
London, United Kingdom

2020 - Némo Biennial, EP7
Paris, France

2019 - Frieze Art Fair, Oculus World Trade Center
New York, New York

2019 - IF Innovation Foundation
Los Angeles, California

2019 - ‘New Cubism’ by Future City, The Gallery at Foyles
London, United Kingdom

PÉLLEAS ET MÉLISANDE

COMMISSION FOR OPERA VLAANDEREN

This production of Debussy’s only opera presents a new concept of abstract staging where the entire scene is formed by a concave mirror creating the impression of being inside a silver eye ball. In the center of the mirrored ‘retina’ is a suspended ‘iris’ projection surface 7-meters in diameter. The screen acts as a portal into the subconscious of the characters and the actions unfolding onstage, this narrative is told using a reinvention of the cosmos. Celestial imagery is manipulated into a surrealist composition which takes the viewer on a metaphysical journey into the subconscious; a psychological ‘portal’ of loneliness, violence, drama, resolution and death.

PERFORMANCES

2020 - Grand Theatre de Geneve
Geneva, Switzerland

2018 - La Fenice
Venice, Italy

2018 - Opera Vlaanderen
Antwerp, Belgium

2018 - Grand Theatre de Luxembourg
Luxembourg City, Luxembourg

2018 - Opera de Strasbourg
Strasbourg

THE SEVEN DEATHS OF MARIA CALLAS

“Vissi d’arte” – a love for her art.

Shortly before the renowned singer Floria Tosca thrusts the knife into the chest of the beastly cynic Scarpia, she sings out her life in wistful retrospect. Although the aria marks the clam before the storm, the death of her adversary, this turning point in Giacomo Puccini’s opera also points to Tosca’s fate. Maria Callas, the primadonna assoluta of the 20th century, sang this aria many times.

Marina Abramović has been fascinated by the life of the “Tigress”, as Callas was known, for decades. She has now developed the 7 Deaths of Maria Callas opera project, in which seven deaths on stage are recreated in exemplary form on the basis of the musical and scenic formative highlights of the respective operas – all arias that were immensely important for Maria Callas.

In seven films and together with Willem Dafoe, Marina Abramović will die seven times and at the end of the performance, with the real death of Maria Callas in Paris in 1977, will be on the stage performing as herself. In addition to the well-known arias from the 19th and 20th centuries, Serbian composer Marko Nikodijević will compose music for the opera’s musical arrangement, and with it illustrate how Callas’s unconditioned love for her art never allowed a separation between the person on stage and the private person.

PERFORMANCES

Bayerische Staatsoper
Munich, Germany

Stavos Niarchos Hall
Athens, Greece

Maggio Musicale Fiorentino
Florence, Italy

Deutsche Oper Berlin
Berlin, Germany

Opéra national de Paris
Paris, France

APOLLO XVII

Apollo XVIII is a multi-channel video installation which interprets man’s relationship to space exploration and presents an imagined mission to the moon; a mission born in the virtual age.

During March 2015, Times Square was transformed into a virtual launchpad as Apollo XVIII played across dozens of electronic billboards from 11:57 p.m. to midnight. In collaboration with NASA, footage was filmed at Cape Canaveral, combined with Hubble imagery, rare material from the NASA archives and original computer-generated imagery to fabricate the fictitious mission.

Combining iconic moments from past and present with the wholly synthetic, Apollo XVIII presented a new collective viewing experience, calling into question the nature of fact and fiction, reality versus perception and context.

EXHIBITIONS & SCREENINGS

Times Square Alliance
New York, New York

New Space Moscow
Moscow, Russia

McCabe Fine Art
Stockholm, Sweden

Houston Museum of Art
Houston, Texas

4K UHD Dual-screen video tile display in custom enclosure. Color, sound. 2:30min, continuous loop.

EVOLUTION (MEGAPLEX)

Inspired by the murals and dioramas found in natural history museums, this cinematic tapestry retells human evolution and history in a loosely-chronological horizontally-scrolling canvas. Characters from all periods of film are set within the vast panorama in an apocalyptic spectacle of constantly unfolding human conflict.

EXHIBITIONS & SCREENINGS

2015 - Fondation Beyeler
Riehen, Switzerland

2013 - ‘The Idyllic Synthesis: Contradictions of Vision and Reality’, Seoul Museum of Art
Seoul, Korea

2012 - ‘Evolution (Megaplex)’, Inaugural Exhibition, Broad Art Museum
East Lansing, Michigan

2012 - ‘Sunlight on Cold Water’, Kunsthalle
Detroit, Michigan

2012 - A trip to the moon: Before and after film, Bonniers Konsthall
Stockholm, Sweden

2012 - Urban Arena #2, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma (MACRO)
Rome, Italy

2012 - ‘New Frontier, Sundance Film Festival, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art
Salt Lake City, Utah

2011 - ‘Official Selection’, 68th Venice International Film Festival
Venice, Italy

2011 - ‘The Dark Lining’, Santa Monica Museum of Art
Santa Monica, California

CREATION (MEGAPLEX)

Set between the birth and death of the universe; an abstract cycle of life is depicted within spiraling 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.

EXHIBITIONS

2019 - Creation VR (in collaboration with Acute Art), Julia Stoschek Collection
Berlin, Germany

2015 - Fondation Beyeler
Riehen, Switzerland

2014 - Michael Fuchs Galerie
Berlin, Germany

2013 - Art Contemporani a la UB. Fundaciaó Sorigué, University of Barcelona
Barcelona, Spain

2013 - SITE Santa Fe
Sante Fe, New Mexico

2013 - Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery
New York, New York

2013 - Saint Patrick’s Basilica
New York, New York

2012 - Christopher Grimes Gallery
Santa Monica, California

CIVILISATION (MEGAPLEX)

Hundreds of characters and scenes sampled from Hollywood cinema populate a vertical scroll depicting an endlessly ascending journey from hell to heaven. This religious-themed tableau contains three distinct visual environments offering a pop-culture reinvention of the volcanic landscape of Hades and the lofty clouds of Heaven.

Exhibitions & SCREENINGS

2012 - Nuit Blanche, Toronto City Hall Rotunda
Toronto, Canada

2015 - Moving Image Itineraries: From LOOP to SCREEN (2003-2013), Kulturhuset
Stockholm, Sweden

2008 - Living the Dream, Christopher Grimes Gallery
Santa Monica, California

2008 - The Standard Hotel (permanent installation)
New York, New York

ANTHROPOCENE

Presented by Art Production Fund and Hugo Boss

Anthropocene is site-specific video installation that visualizes the dynamic between the natural and man-made, Anthropocene explores the relationship between New York’s Central Park and the surrounding city. The term “anthropocene” describes the extent of influence human activities have had on Earth’s ecosystems. Two intersecting cinematic video channels track the terrain from the southwest corner to the northeast corner of Central Park employing LiDAR scanning, a technology used in archaeology to digitally map objects using reflected laser light.

SCREENINGS

Time Warner Center, Columbus Circle (New York, New York)

Three-channel video installation. Color, Sound. Duration: 8m 3s.

THE MASTER BUILDER

Commission for the Rockefeller Group

The Master Builder is a bas-relief mural inspired by those found adorning the entrances at Rockefeller Plaza and presented as a moving tableau vivant.

The slowly-scrolling video collage, commissioned by Rockefeller Group retells the Rockefeller legacy from the past into the present day and finally, the future - punctuated by iconic moments and monumental architecture ingrained in the historic fabric of Manhattan.

The film is a continuous “time-lapse” journey where the promise of the American Dream is shaped into reality.

Single-channel 3D, video, color, sound, 02:00m, loop

CATHEDRAL

Cathedral was filmed at the Toronto Eaton Centre mega mall during the Christmas shopping season. Here is consumerism as spectacle: Throngs of shoppers circulate in slow motion, in superimposed and multi-layered images that transform the mall into a kaleidoscopic, hallucinatory space. The cyclical montage is inspired by the time and motion studies of Frederick Winslow Taylor and Frank Gilbreth, which date from the American industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century. The video is installed in a mirrored box, bringing the video into three dimensions and further multiplying the images.

Part of the Metronome Foundation of Contemporary Art public collection (Barcelona, Spain)

Exhibitions

2008 - LOOP
Barcelona, Spain

2008 - Art Production Fund, LAB
New York, New York

2008 - Future Projections, Toronto International Film Festival
Toronto, Canada

ECHO

COMMISSIONED FOR EXTELL/ONE57

Echo employs LiDAR scanning technology to capture a scientifically accurate representation of the geography of Central Park. LIDAR, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging, uses a pulsed laser to generate a three-dimensional model of the environment and its surface characteristics. To create this impressionistic portrait of Central park, Brambilla took more than 200 Lidar scans (one every 75 feet moving in a roughly south to north direction) to create a detailed depiction of the park down to each leaf on a tree. The result of these scans; the “point-clouds” were then collaged together to create a virtual landscape through which we are taken on a fluid, hyper-sensory journey revealing familiar points of interest in an unexpected and impressionistic way.

Echo (Lidar Central Park) visualizes the resonance between what is natural and man-made, organic and technological, through the intersection of the technique and the unique landscape it explores.

The ultra-high definition video is a permanent installation in the lobby of Manhattan’s tallest building on Central Park, One 57.

UHD video. Color, sound. 15m continuous loop.

Three-channel video. Color, sound. 01:43 min., loop

SYNC

Sync is Brambilla’s first sampled video work which features three tightly edited sequences of film clips taken from fight scenes, sex scenes, as well as audience reactions from an archive of films. Running at up to 12 individual shots per second and projected on three suspended screens, the installation puts the viewer in a video crossfire; building violently to a state of sensory overload. Sync is a reflection of the rising threshold to graphic sex and brutality in contemporary popular culture and film.

Part of the Metronome Foundation for Contemporary Art public collection (Barcelona, Spain)