If you’ve ever stood gazing at The Starry Night in the Museum of Modern Art in New York (or on your desktop background) and wanted to enter Vincent Van Gogh’s dreamy landscape, here’s a suitably tech-enabled 2018 way to do it. Travelling multimedia exhibition Van Gogh Alive – The Experience is coming to the UAE for a three-month stay, and the audio-visual show will project high-definition images of the celebrated Dutch post-Impressionist artist’s paintings across the floor, walls and ceilings of the exhibition space. You can walk through the space and let the colours and art wash all over you.
Sounds magical, right? The show will also have a carefully curated soundtrack of classical music that will accompany over 3,000 images – a mix of photographs and videos that explain Van Gogh’s inspiration combined with images of his art; the tormented artist, who is known as the ‘mad genius’, created over 2,000 works of art, including 860 oil paintings. Only one of them sold during his lifetime.
The prolific painter’s art has been on display in museums for over a hundred years but the immersive exhibition does one better than museums and creates an interactive experience where Van Gogh’s art will not only be shown in their entirety but they will also be broken down into highlighted sections and interesting parts will be magnified, so you can truly engross yourself in masterpieces like Sunflowers and Irises and explore meanings and ideas behind every brushstroke.
The exhibition by Grande Exhibitions, creators of travelling exhibition projects, will run as two separate six-week shows; you can catch it first at the Abu Dhabi National Theatre from January 14-February 26 and later at Dubai Design District from March 11-April 23.
This isn’t the first time Van Gogh and his works are gracing the UAE – the troubled artist’s Self Portrait is currently on display at the Louvre, Abu Dhabi on loan from France’s Musée d’Orsay, and 3D-print copies of Van Gogh’s works were on display at Fairmont The Palm in 2015 as part of The Relievo Collection.
Tickets cost Dh70 for adults and Dh65 for children aged 16 and below; visit platinumlist.ae.
