The following article was written by Jane Hamann for the Art Forward series through the Rahr-West Art Museum.
You may never be lucky enough to see Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings in a museum in Amsterdam, Paris, or even Chicago, but you can enjoy an exhibition at the Milwaukee Center that pairs digital artistry with over three hundred of Van Gogh’s most famous works of art.
Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience was created by French-Canadian Director Mathieu St-Arnaud and a multidisciplinary team of artists, stage directors, and production houses. St-Arnaud also enlisted Canadian Fanny Curtat, PhD, as Art History Consultant. This team at Beyond Exhibitions at Normal Studios in Montreal incorporated Van Gogh’s own thoughts and words into the narrative and musical score, producing a unique multimedia experience touting cutting-edge projection technology using over four trillion content pixels. This expands Vincent’s paintings into a fantastic 360-degree environment that engulfs and delights viewers.

4/12/2021 – Beyond Van Gogh – Miami – RodrigoGaya.com/@Gayaman_photo/Gayaman Visual Studio
According to St-Arnaud Beyond Van Gogh breaks the confines of the frame and allows the spectator to be fully immersed in a world larger than life where one can virtually feel the paint being applied to the digital canvas. I found it to be mesmerizing as strokes were added to the colorful gigantic canvases all around me, even as colors swirled around my feet.
So who was Vincent Van Gogh? Van Gogh (1853-1890) was a Dutch Post-impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In a decade, he created about 2,100 paintings and drawings, including about 860 oil paintings, most of which date from the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still-lives and portraits, and are characterized by bold colors and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushworkthat contributed to the foundations of modern art. During his lifetime, he was not commercially successful, and his suicide at thirty-seven came after years of depression and poverty. In 2017 a Van Gogh painting sold for $72,000,000.
Vincent was especially close to his younger brother Theo and the Beyond the Van Gogh exhibit scrolls on the walls some excerpts from the almost 800 letters he penned to his brother. At one point in the approximately hour-long show, a beautifully animated effect of almond blossoms comes to life. You feel as if you are on that field on a windy day and all the tree’s blossoms are blowing off all around you. Van Gogh’s picture of almond blossoms was painted for Theo’s son. After his nephew’s birth, Vincent wrote, “I started right away to make a picture for him, to hang in their bedroom, branches of white almond blossoms against a blue sky.”

4/12/2021 – Beyond Van Gogh – Miami – RodrigoGaya.com/@Gayaman_photo/Gayaman Visual Studio
Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience is comprised of three rooms.
The first room is the Waterfall Room, filled with splashes and dots of colors flowing down the walls, intermittently forming into one of the artist’s self-portraits, hinting at and preparing guests for the experience of what is to come.
Next, the larger Education Room features panels of biographical information and explanations of the major elements of his work, relating it to today. You walk through this room, which reminded me of the switchback lines at a theme park, at your own pace, as you listen and read the screens.
The gym sized third room, the Immersive Experience Room, with it’s ever changing images on pillar-like structures, walls and floors was my favorite. It transports visitors into Van Gogh’s works, becoming one with his colorful, expressive canvases. His famous sunflowers, irises and cypresses appear and then melt as if the paint is dripping off the canvas. As the subjects appear they are slowly “painted” and develop into a completed section of a Van Gogh painting. Portraits of common folk and Van Gogh himself appear. (He painted 43 self-portraits often because he couldn’t afford to pay models.) Some of his most famous paintings such as Starry Night and Café Terrace at Night are digitally contrived to come alive and are awe-inspiring.
The show is suitable for all ages and is an artistic experience unlike a traditional gallery showing. Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience will be at the Wisconsin Center in downtown Milwaukee through October 31. Tickets can be purchased at VanGoghMilwaukee.com