Andrea Galvani

Constituted by a multichannel video and sound installation developed specifically for Fotografiska Shanghai, Andrea Galvani‘s first solo exhibition in Asia — The Void Migrates to the Surface offers an immersive experience, bringing visitors into a new dimension of time.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Andrea Galvani presents The Void Migrates to the Surface — the Italian-born, international artist’s first solo exhibition in Asia — at Fotografiska Shanghai, opening September 12, 2025 and on view through January 12, 2026. Constituted by a multichannel video and sound installation developed specifically for Fotografiska Shanghai, this groundbreaking show offers an immersive experience, bringing visitors into a new dimension of time.

Galvani has established an acclaimed artistic practice rooted in an exploration of the natural world and our human condition. In his latest cinematic masterpiece, the artist extends the brief lives of twenty rare and endangered butterfly species — from just a few weeks to 73 years, the global average human life expectancy. Using advanced super-slow motion technology capable of capturing up to 1 million frames per second, Galvani dilates time with precision — stretching seconds into minutes and aligning the lifespan of butterflies with that of human beings.

Within this parallel universe of altered temporality, viewers are immersed in a radiant purple cosmos where they witness dazzling butterflies flying in slow motion. The Void Migrates to the Surface crystallizes a gradual, graceful choreography of flight — of fragility and resilience, delicacy and monumentality. As the butterflies move, visitors observe the subtle passage of time through their natural aging process — the fraying of wings, the fall of iridescent scales, and the shimmering traces they leave behind. Projected in Fotografiska’s Exhibition Hall A at architectural scale, Galvani’s mesmerizing installation invites viewers into a new cosmology. There, boundaries between life and void, ephemerality and eternity dissolve in a complex continuum.

Accompanying the visuals is a soundtrack specifically developed for the exhibition by celebrated composer and musician Federico Albanese. Luminous yet melancholic, intricate yet hopeful, the music interprets the images’ majestic power — melodically synchronizing the visual ascent and descent, stillness and motion that unravel across a different order of time.

The Void Migrates to the Surface creates more than just an immersive sensory spectacle — Galvani’s installation transports audiences into a world that coexists within and yet remains invisible to our everyday reality. Through his profound technological intervention on our perception of temporal flow, Galvani exposes anthropocentric limitations and encourages us to move beyond them. The Void Migrates to the Surface takes on a clear political, philosophical, and existential direction—life is an event that embodies time in a continuous natural flow, without perimeters.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Andrea Galvani (born Italy, 1973) lives and works in New York and Mexico City. His rigorous research informs his use of photography, video, drawing, sculpture, sound, performance, neon, archival materials, and monumental installations that are developed around the architecture of exhibition spaces. His practice seems to heighten our awareness, drawing from concepts and tools across different disciplines, often adopting scientific languages and methodologies. The artist documents collective actions, visionary experiments, and physical phenomena whose spectacular monumentality is paradoxically unstable and ephemeral. Relationships between experience, physical effort, failure, the limitations of media and the locations in which he works appear as determining factors in the development of complex projects that are often the result of collaborations with institutions, universities, and research laboratories. His vast and immersive body of work extends our perspective from individual to collective, personal to planetary and beyond—contextualizing human experience within geological time, cosmic change, and social transformation.

Galvani has exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Museum, New York; the 23rd Triennale di Milano; the 4th Moscow Biennial for Contemporary Art; the Mediations Biennial, Poznań, Poland; 9th Biennial of Contemporary Art of Nicaragua; Art in General, New York; Aperture Foundation, New York; The Calder Foundation, New York; Liljevalchs Konstall / the Nobel Prize Museum, Stockholm; Pavilion - Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Bucharest; Mart Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Trento; Macro Museum, Rome; GAMeC, Bergamo; De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam; Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; Sculpture Center, New York; among others. His work is part of major public and private collections in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa, including: the Permanent Collection at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; Deutsche Bank Collection, London; Fundación la Caixa, Madrid; Schloss Kummerow Museum of Contemporary Photography, Kummerow, Germany; Colección SOLO, Madrid; Artist Pension Trust, New York; Banca Generali, Milan; the Contemporary Art Society, Aspen Collection, New York; the UniCredit Art Collection, Milan; the Permanent Collection of the United States Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC; the Mart Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto; the 500 Capp Street Foundation, San Francisco; and MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome. He was a visiting artist at New York University, and has completed several artist residencies in New York, including Location One International Artist Residency Program, the LMCC Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the MIA Artist Space Program/Columbia University School of the Arts. In 2011, he received the New York Exposure Prize and was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. In 2016, the Mart Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto presented Galvani's first mid-career retrospective in Europe. In 2017, his work was selected to represent the Deutsche Bank Collection at Frieze New York. Andrea Galvani (Mousse Publishing), a comprehensive monograph of over 10 years of work and research, was published September 2018 and is distributed worldwide. In 2019, he was awarded the prestigious Audemars Piguet Prize. In 2020, the artist presented a monumental solo show and 4-month long durational performance at the Mattatoio Roma / MACRO Testaccio. In 2022, the artist was invited to present a site-specific installation commission at the 23rd Triennale di Milano International Exhibition Unknown Unknowns: An Introduction to Mystery, curated by Ersilia Vaudo Scarpetta.