It’s not often you see sunflowers in Mumbai. Or a sky full of purple stars.
Both are on rather giant display at the immersive art event, Van Gogh 360, at the World Trade Center in Mumbai.
A makeshift shelter at WTC has been transformed into a room full of van Goghs. His art appears, bit by bit, on giant screens that enclose the space.
The rendering of his masterpieces, let’s just say it, is a mix of hits and misses. The animation shudders unsteadily (and unnecessarily) across four giant screens. Why depict peasants sitting at supper by lamplight, jerkily moving their forks? Who knows? In the rendering of the Bedroom in Arles, the furniture floats downward, settles for a bit, then floats upward and off the screens.
Between all the movement, though, the unspeakable beauty of van Gogh’s work shines through. Not in the way the small frames and aching beauty of the Vincent van Gogh gallery at Paris’s Musee d’Orsay do. But in a way that remains a moving tribute to a man whose only buyer, in his lifetime, was his brother. Van Gogh was a Dutch post-Impressionist master who gave his art away as gifts in exchange for little acts of kindness -- gifts that were often tossed in attics and in one case (Portrait of Doctor Félix Rey) used by the subject’s mother to plug a hole in a chicken coop.
Van Gogh died at 37, by suicide. He had struggled for years to still the unrest in his mind. He admitted himself to an asylum, tried herbal cures, frustrated his friends and, famously, cut off part of an ear.
{{/usCountry}}Van Gogh died at 37, by suicide. He had struggled for years to still the unrest in his mind. He admitted himself to an asylum, tried herbal cures, frustrated his friends and, famously, cut off part of an ear.
{{/usCountry}}He died never dreaming that, over a hundred years later, young people would gather and sit mesmerised as his paintings played across giant screens, in a city far away.
The show’s sold out in Mumbai and travels to Delhi and Ahmedabad over 2023, but there are other easy ways to immerse yourself in van Gogh’s art. We’d recommend you start with the 94-minute film Loving Vincent (2017), streaming on several platforms. It tells the story of the artist in his own visual style, through hand-drawn post-Impressionist animation -- another thing he couldn’t have imagined, when he painted in desperate solitude all those years ago.