A “Comet” Lands at Palazzo Maffei: Anna Galtarossa Transforms the Baroque Staircase into a Suspended Cosmos

Verona, October 9, 2025 – It didn’t fall from the sky, but instead glided into the heart of one of Verona’s most historic buildings: a thirteen-meter-long Comet, the work of artist Anna Galtarossa, has taken up residence in the spectacular helical staircase of Palazzo Maffei. The site-specific installation, unveiled on October 9, is a colorful celestial body that slowly rotates, creating an immersive experience amplified by the sound design of Oscar winner Nicolas Becker.

The piece, conceived especially for the Baroque staircase of the Fondazione Carlon, is part of the museum’s exhibition strategy to foster dialogue between its vast collection of ancient art (with artifacts spanning up to 4,000 years) and contemporary art. Galtarossa’s Cometa (Veronese by birth, but active between New York and Verona) is the latest in a series of collaborations with international artists, following in the footsteps of Maurizio Nannucci, Chiara Dynys, and others.

The Celestial Body: Between Material, Memory, and Irony

The suspended sculpture, measuring 13 meters in length, traverses the building vertically, pausing in a moment of “suspension” just before grazing the statue of Flora on the ground floor. Constructed from recycled materials, fabrics, and everyday and agricultural objects—from ties and plastic bottles to hair rollers and agricultural reels—the artwork is a synthesis of Galtarossa’s unique language, which transforms common items into symbols and constellations, flowing with ecology, irony, and melancholy.

As explained by Vanessa Carlon, director of Palazzo Maffei and vice-president of the Fondazione, the choice of Galtarossa—an artist “capable of speaking to the community across the board”—was motivated by her ability to convey “the most serious and urgent issues of our time, condensing them into a wish for peace.” Sealing the link to the site’s history, the director revealed a tenderly ironic detail: the entire colorful comet emerges from the sleeves of a shirt that actually belonged to Luigi Carlon, the great patron and collector who established the Foundation.

Nicolas Becker’s Soundscape

The slow, relentless counter-clockwise rotation of the Comet—a symbolic attempt to rewind time toward a utopian past—is accompanied by a three-dimensional soundscape created by Nicolas Becker, the French sound designer who won an Oscar in 2021 for Sound of Metal.

His compositions—”sonic echoes, voices, distant music: acoustic specters”—move through the space like a breath, oscillating between unease and solace. This sonic framework completes the visual experience, transforming the 17th-century Baroque staircase—one of the rare examples of a self-supporting helical structure—into a living, pulsating organism.

An Invitation to Collective Imagination

The artwork is a profound dialogue between the ancient and the contemporary: stone becomes sky, and architecture transforms into a gravitational orbit. As Andrea Lissoni, artistic director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich and author of the critical text, emphasizes, the Cometa does not celebrate completed heroism, but “opens up hypotheses, fantasies, and ancestral games whose rules we do not know.”

“The shimmering, colorful journey that Cometa proposes,” Lissoni continues, “can therefore be read as an invitation to still believe in imagination. Because the revolution is not a concluded act but a motion that continues, collective, luminous.” In this sense, Anna Galtarossa’s Cometa stands as “a luminous promise that cuts across us, a gesture of love toward the Earth and toward all that can still be reborn from its ruins.”