A familiar Monet image features in the show (pic: Terry Murden)
Beyond Monet: The Immersive Experience
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This exhibition based on the work of the impressionist Claude Monet runs in tandem with a similar experience of Van Gogh’s work at the Royal Highland Centre. They helped create new forms of art and the creators of these exhibitions use projection technology to provide a 21st century overlay on more than 700 paintings by the two masters. By releasing them from their frames we are, apparently, “taken into the minds of the artists”.
Well, the value of an “immersive experience” is determined by how the ticket holder feels, and while sitting through half-an-hour of swirly, blown-up moving images of Monet’s finest work I was left wondering how it was adding to the appreciation of the original paintings.
Beyond Monet, making its Scottish premiere, and Beyond Van Gogh, which ran in Glasgow in the summer, run on separate days for a month in the Lowland Hall.
The imagery created by Annerin Productions draws on familiar works such as Van Gogh’s The Starry Night and Sunflowers as well as Monet’s Water Lilies and Poppies at Argenteuil. We are promised an “unforgettable fusion of art and technology – an experience that offers a breathtaking new perspective on the masters of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism”. I’m not sure it really lives up to that billing.
Visitors can sit and take in the large-frame moving images (pic: Terry Murden)
The technology is indeed impressive, in fact it’s arguably the star attraction, but you could probably find an app on your phone that would do much the same thing. A musical accompaniment does create a sense of calm fused with the beauty of the art, but it’s just that: an accompaniment.
There is not enough happening to make this unforgettable. Visitors will get the same experience from a brief walk-through as they will by sitting through the entire display.
I couldn’t help think that the exhibition would have been more suited to a room at the National Galleries as it’s asking a lot of tourists to make the trek by car, taxi, or tram-and-taxi to the Royal Highland Centre which is a cold (particularly at this time of year) and cavernous shed on what is little more than an industrial estate.
Go if you’re big fan of art and tech, but I didn’t really get it and I’m afraid this left me underwhelmed.
Beyond Monet and Beyond Van Gogh run at the Royal Highland Centre, Edinburgh, from 29 Nov to 2 Jan
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