Marco Brambilla is a Canadian filmmaker and director. Having once worked in Hollywood, he is a pioneer video and installation artist who on occasion uses 360º panoramas and extended or augmented realties.
Read MoreKnown for his enthusiasm for advanced 3D technologies and computer mapping, Brambilla's complex, digitally collaged videos involve hundreds of appropriated looped film samples. Densely packed with detailed moving forms, lush music, and unexpected varieties of space, these immersive spectacles combine the sensibilities of Dante, Hieronymus Bosch, and Andy Warhol within an apocalyptic field. The recent projects are intended as a critique of Hollywood's vacuous love of the spectacle.
Brambilla had his tertiary education at Ryerson University in Toronto, where he studied feature-film making and commercials.
He first became known for directing a series of blockbuster science-fiction and action movies and comedies that include Demolition Man (1993) and Excess Baggage (1997).
Despite a background in Hollywood, Marco Brambilla is now a creator of plotless, highly physical, music-propelled films made for galleries and museums. Brambilla's works incorporate a great many film loops and sometimes have vertical screens.
The artist became interested in recycling, collaging, and re-contexualising found film clips in Sync (2005), some of which are inverted, overlaid, repeated, and fragmented like in a kaleidoscope. The screen is a pulsating rectangle of constant movement without a single point of focus, for the whole oblong surface is a source of fascination.
Brambilla's key achievement thus far has been the four-part 'Megaplex' series, criticising the extreme saturation level of images in popular media, using four films: Civilization (2008), Evolution (2010), Creation (2012), and Heaven's Gate (2021). He later adapted these works for versions in Virtual Reality.
In his Pop-esque references Brambilla uses his looping techniques to attack consumerism, whether that be the infatuation with media-created personas as seen in the writhing panoramas of Heaven's Gate (2021); the glorification of danger in Wall of Death, 2001; or more palpable objects of desire such as lipstick or doughnuts in smaller more surreal works like the 'metallic' 'Metaform' series (2021), which comments on fetishism.
Brambilla is inventive and unpredictable in the range of video projects he takes on. 1n 1999, he filmed Approach at John F. Kennedy Airport, showing long-distance passengers arriving and searching for a familiar contact, Brambilla slowing down footage on camcorders as individuals meet.
In 2020, Brambilla created The Four Temperaments, encapsulating a series of character studies enacted by Cate Blanchett, each character's talking head isolated in a hovering bubble.
In 2001, Brambilla presented a video work influenced by Yves Klein's iconic photograph Leap into the Void (1960) on the Jumbotron screen in New York's Times Square. Also drawn from art history was Brambilla's Nude Descending a Staircase #3, which reimagined Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase #2 (1912) in a work screened at the World Trade Center in 2019.
Brambilla received the Tiffany Comfort Foundation Award in Film and Video in 2000 and 2002.
Marco Brambilla has been involved in many solo and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include Heaven's Gate, Havana Biennial (2022); Heaven's Gate, Perez Art Museum, Miami (2021); Object to be Destroyed (Enlarged), Outernet Arts, London (2021); Regeneration, NEMO, Paris (2020); Lunar Atlas, Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul (2018); Lunar, Galerie Clemens Gunzer, Zurich (2018); Apollo, McCabe Fine Art, Stockholm (2015); The Dark Lining, Santa Monica Museum of Art (2011).
Group exhibitions include Apparition, Phi Center, Montreal (2021); Terminal, City Gallery Wellington (2020); Dieu(x), Museum of Europe, Geneva (2019); Apollo XVIII, New Space Moscow (2016); Lunar, Galerie Clemens Gunzer, Zurich (2015).
Brambilla's work is held in international collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul; Museum of the Moving Image, New York; Metronóm Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Barcelona; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
Marco Brambilla's website can be found here, and his Instagram here.
John Hurrell | Ocula | 2021
