Andreas Zampella "Il cielo sopra Milano". Exhibited at Poggiali Gallery in Milan

Poggiali Gallery presents Il cielo sopra Milano, an exhibition by Andreas Zampella curated by Nicolas Ballario. The installation recreates within the gallery spaces a strange and unsettling starry sky, which the city of Milan will be able to admire every night from outside the gallery. The exhibition will open on Wednesday, 11 February, at the gallery’s Milan venue, Foro Buonaparte 52.

Andreas Zampella, Vite silenziose, 55x40cm, olio su canovaccio, 2025

In a Milan where the stars are no longer visible, where the sky has been erased by public lighting, advertising, and the constant reflection of consumption turned in on itself, night still exists, but it is no longer dark. Thus Andreas Zampella, as Nicolas Ballario states, “performs a gesture that is at once archaic and profoundly contemporary: he restores the stars to our gaze by bringing them into a room. From the ceiling of the Poggiali Gallery an unnatural constellation takes shape. Objects of everyday use, fragments of daily life, and remnants of a hyper-functioning civilization are glued together, suspended, and removed from the gravity of their fate. Where they should have fallen, remained, or decayed, they now shine. Darkness ignites them. Fluorescence transforms them into signals, presences, improvised celestial bodies. They are objects destined to be thrown away, and perhaps for this very reason they become a still life. Yet it is a still life that betrays its very name: because here nothing is truly immobile, nothing is pacified. These forms seem alive, unstable, ready to change state. The light they emit does not console: it unsettles.”

In his work, Zampella develops the idea that everyday life is a continuous performance and that the still life today is a pure form of spectacle and a powerfully evocative image. In Giorgio de Chirico’s understanding, the still life is a representation of the “silent life of objects.” In his reinterpretation, the artist sees life as a source of light, and the constellation presented in the spaces of the Poggiali Gallery alludes to the ambivalence between the vitality of light and the death of the forgotten object. In this way, his work evokes in the viewer a fluctuating sense between weariness and tension, irony and melancholy, guiding them toward a reflection on mortality and on the meaning of time in human life.

Ritratto di Andreas Zampella

Indeed, the installation urges us to look upward—a daily gesture, often performed in solitude, yet today almost forgotten. In the exhibition, the viewer’s gaze is compelled to do so. These found and reassembled objects become artificial galaxies: worlds that are both distant and very near at the same time. A universe built from what remains. A cosmos without heroism, without conquest, without promise. Only drift. Only cold light in the darkness. In this universe, humankind is not at the center, but beneath it—tiny, a spectator of what it has created and already forgotten.

GALLERIA POGGIALI | MILANO

Andreas Zampella. Il cielo sopra Milano

Foro Buonaparte 52, 20121 Milan