Verona, Palazzo Maffei welcomes a new site-specific installation: it's Comet by Anna Galtarossa


A new site-specific installation located in the scenic helicoidal staircase was inaugurated at Palazzo Maffei in Verona: it is Comet, a suspended sculpture, a falling comet, with a thirteen-meter-long tail that slowly rotates.

A new site-specific installation located in the scenic helicoidal staircase was inaugurated at Palazzo Maffei in Verona, in an evocative dialogue between art and architecture. The work was created from the poetic and visionary imagery of Anna Galtarossa, accompanied by “sound echoes” composed by Oscar winner Nicolas Becker.

The new work, entitled Comet, is a suspended sculpture, a falling comet, with a thirteen-meter-long tail that slowly rotates, combining organic, industrial, and chromatic materials. The star appears to plummet toward the statue of Flora, placed in the center of the staircase, but stops an instant before impact. Rotating counterclockwise, the comet seems to want to rewind time, evoking universal questions: will we succeed in saving nature or remain spectators of its destruction? In its suspended movement, the work becomes a symbol of fragile balance between fall and rebirth, between the past and a future yet to be imagined.

In the installation, the artist weaves together common objects and handmade materials, both natural and synthetic - plastic bottles, neckties, climbing hooks, clothespins, agricultural wire coils and curlers - which are transformed into new matter, blending the domestic and the cosmic, the kitsch and the poetic. The result is an ironic and visionary sculpture, consistent with the poetics of the artist, who lives and works between New York and Verona and is known for her works that combine myth, memory and the everyday and often involve the public in ingenious architecture.

Complementing the installation is an original soundscape designed by Nicolas Becker. Sounds and voices seem to emerge and dissolve in space, like acoustic evaporations, fragments of a universe in transformation. Becker, recognized for his experimental approach to sound design in films such as Batman Begins, Gravity, Harry Potter, The Golden Army and Sound of Metal (for which he received an Oscar for best sound in 2021), brings to this collaboration the same emotional intensity and perceptual sensitivity that characterize his artistic research.

With Comet, Palazzo Maffei continues its path of dialogue between the ancient and the contemporary.

Comet
Comet
Comet
Comet
Comet
Comet

“Comet” is the new installation commissioned by Palazzo Maffei in Verona for the museum’s grand staircase. A suspended sculpture, a comet with a thirteen-meter tail that slowly rotates. The title functions as a metonymy: it promises the swiftness of a celestial body crossing the horizon, but in reality it manifests itself as a vertical, counterclockwise motion in the monumental trumpet of the staircase. Thus described, Comet might evoke a visionary monument, a rotating structure like Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1917). But in Galtarossa’s work, references, while dense and conscious, never translate into monumental citation. In Verona, Comet houses industrial and raw materials, colorful fragments, dancing elements that return a fairy-tale and domestic energy, fragile and popular. Its trajectory, moreover, is not ascending but descending: a slow fall, oriented toward the statue of Flora at the end of the staircase, almost brushing against it, suspended on the brink of an impact that never happens," explains Andrea Lissoni, artistic director of Munich’s Haus der Kunst. “In this gravitational waltz, sonic echoes, voices, distant music emerge and disappear: acoustic spectres composed by Nicolas Becker. His score moves like an unsteady breath, oscillating between disquiet and consolation, between foreboding and memory. The shimmering, colorful journey Comet proposes is that of a monument to the present: it celebrates neither heroisms nor accomplished revolutions, but opens to hypotheses, fantasies, ancestral games whose rules we do not know. It is an imaginative device that dances between past and future, an invitation to still believe in imagination. In its slow rotation, it invites us to participate, to watch together, to let ourselves be transported, to hypnotize and believe in visions. Revolution, it is not a concluded act but a motion that continues, collective, luminous.”

Photo by Andrea Pugiotto.

Verona, Palazzo Maffei welcomes a new site-specific installation: it's Comet by Anna Galtarossa
Verona, Palazzo Maffei welcomes a new site-specific installation: it's Comet by Anna Galtarossa


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