La Rinascente celebrates Christmas 2015 with an art installation created for the historic department store windows on Piazza Duomo in Milan.

The Swiss artist John Armleder has been commissioned to create a site-specific work of great visual and conceptual impact, in a project curated by Cloe Piccoli.

An internationally acclaimed artist shown in leading galleries and museums, John Armleder has approached the holiday theme in the past, with his Christmas Parties, fabulous happenings that have brought outstanding personalities from the art world to Geneva every year, accompanied by imaginative compilations of jingles.

A protagonist of the most radical artistic experimentation of the 1960s, from Fluxus to Groupe Ecart, which he founded in Geneva, Armleder makes performances, actions, environments, paintings, including the Pour Paintings and his well-known Furniture Sculptures.

For the holiday windows of La Rinascente, the artist has created Let it Shine, Let it Shine, Let it Shine. It’s Xmas again!, a total artwork that combines various media: painting, installation and music. The audience becomes part of the work, casting its shadow inside the installation and virtually crossing it, as if to share a single space in which art and life intertwine and overlap.

Young curators and artists from the Brera Academy will be on hand to narrate the story and the meaning of the installation for passers-by.

A video about the making of the work will be made in collaboration with the artist, as another narrative element to communicate the complexity and intensity of a work that La Rinascente offers as a Christmas present to the city of Milan.