My Review Of Van Gogh Alive by Cora Wallace

I saw the Van Gogh Alive exhibition at MediaCity with my parents on Thursday

 20th January. Van Gogh Alive is on a tour of the UK, having over 8.5 million visitors

 across 75 cities worldwide

 as an

 “immersive, multi-sensory experience about the life and works of Vincent Van Gogh”. 

 

There have been quite a few Van Gogh immersive experiences, the first of which took

 place during the 2000s in Europe. Other artists have been featured in similar shows,

 including Picasso and Monet, but Van Gogh's have been most successful, possibly due 

to the Netflix series Emily In Paris depicting a (loosely) Van Gogh-themed experience in

 Paris.In 2008, the first showing: "Imagine Van Gogh: The Immersive Exhibition" was 

created byAnnabelle Mauger, who built off a model her grandfather-in-lawcreated, called

 "Image Totale". There have since been numerous similar exhibits including the

 "Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit", "Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience", "Beyond Van Gogh",

 and the one I visited" Van Gogh Alive". The events received a lot of complaints over their 

similar names that have led customers to accidentally purchase tickets to the wrong one! 

               

Despite going on a weekday, the event was extremely busy. Entering the building, 

there was a loop-shaped room,directing one around the different events in Van Gogh’s life.

 An issue with this was the room’s capacity for visitors, who were moving extremely slowly 

around the display, probably through fault of the visitorsat the front, however this drew 

attention to the management of this crowd. It would be safer and more convenient for the event 

to take a certain amount of visitors at once, to prevent the huge overcrowding we experienced, 

so visitors could enjoy the experience at their own pace. After a few minutes, we decided that going

through this room, as slow as it would take, would not be worth it as the displays weren’t really

visible over the other people looking at them. So we skipped the loop to a dark room that 

held about twenty projector screens portraying Van Gogh’s works, set to classical music. 

One of the screens was showing quotes from the artist’s writing (that some visitors were 

sitting in front of, obscuring the bottom of the text) and another occasionally described the 

artistic period being shown on the other screens. We entered the room towards the end of the

 show, we realised this after the show ended and began to playfrom the start again.

 It was sort of strange to see it at the end, showing the art towards the end of Van Gogh’s

 life, and then start again to his early art to fill in the huge gap. 

This could be solved again by the venue lettingvisitors enter in groups, so that they would 

all see the showing from the beginning. The show was good quality and well presented, though a

little long and less interesting without the knowledge of his life missed from the earlier exhibit. 

The show did seem to be more about the spectacle than the art, with the projections

not portraying the depth of the original pieces’ brush strokes, which are considered to be a key

element of his artistry. Despite the opinion of some critics, I enjoyed the creative licence taken with

Van Gogh’s works and would be happy to see more animation of his works, including the

integration of quotes into the art itself. This would perhaps set this experience apart from the

other immersive Van Gogh shows. I would not call the exhibit a multi-sensory experience as

described by the website, as the exhibits involved only sight and sound, the same sensory experience 

found in any cinema.However they could have, as other Van Gogh experienceshave, used 

fragrance as an immersive toolwith the paintings. 

Overall, the exhibition was a slight disappointment, but one that was welcomed nevertheless.