The Van Gogh Immersive Experience – Touring the World

This exhibition is the work of Annabelle Mauger and Julien Baron, who collaborated on the creation of immersive shows at Cathédrale d’Images in Les Baux-de-Provence, using the concept of Image Totale^© conceived by Albert Plécy. For Imagine Van Gogh, they employed advanced techniques of multi-projection and immersive audio to add emotional depth to each image, allowing us to live and feel the creative energy of the esteemed artist.

• An excerpt from a review by New York Times’ Jason Farago.

Babies don’t develop stereoscopic vision for the first few months of their life; they have a hard time perceiving depth and dimensions, and therefore gravitate to swirling shapes and bright colors. They and others with similar tastes will find great pleasure in our culture’s latest virally transmitted spectacles, which distill fin-de-siècle French painting into an amusement as captivating as a nursery mobile.

Vincent van Gogh, his corpse moldering in Auvers-sur-Oise and his paintings out of copyright, has these past few years been dragooned into a new sort of immersive exhibition that reproduces his churning paintings of Provence as wall-filling animated projections…. The Franco-Dutch artist has always been a huge box-office draw (the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam drew 2 million visitors in 2019), but a touring exhibition of paintings takes years and costs millions, and reputable museums don’t lend their works to a for-profit enterprise.

What a few entrepreneurial exhibitionists figured out is that many of us are less attached to van Gogh’s paintings than to the mythology that surrounds them. And that you can exhibit without royalties.

Producers have strung together hi-res digital copies of “Bedroom in Arles” or “Wheatfield with Crows” into medium-length films, supplemented with astral soundtracks (and well-stocked gift shops). These things are such profit spinners that half a dozen competing Vincent spectacles have arisen, drawing millions of visitors from Toledo to Abu Dhabi to shell out for a 21st-century version of the Joshua Light Show.

Touring the world, these “Starry Night”-filled rooms also landed in NYC that actually owns “Starry Night” — and indeed in New York, there are 20-odd other Van Goghs, held between the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. These actual van Goghs shared the island with this “fairground” attraction…..

Take an Immersive Experience into Van Gogh –

from Youtube promoting the Toronto incarnation.

(Video is 34 minutes long.)

Photo by Michael Brosilow showing social distancing at the event in Dallas.

Immersive Van Gogh, with its Starry Night projections and social media-ready promise, has seemingly swept the country in one fell swoop. Inside the cavernous spaces, a mix of booming music and visuals immediately takes over. Projections, rendered by a group of artists out of Italy, are constantly moving and evolving into one iconic painting after another. Another room projects the artist’s works around a striking mirror forest designed by the show’s creative director David Korins, who’s received awards for his design work on Hamilton and Dear Evan Hanson.

“Immersive art makes you feel differently,” shared curator Svetlana Dvoretsky. “With this particular work, we’ve seen people meditating, dancing, crying, even proposing — all kinds of emotions are coming out.”