We booked tickets for Beyond Van Gogh - The Immersive Experience in Liverpool. It looked intriguing from the adverts but we weren’t really sure what it would be like.
Wow! We weren’t disappointed.
We arrived at the cavernous Exhibition Centre and wandered through a number of darkened areas with large display panels about Van Gogh and his work. These were interesting but were presumably intended to keep the queueing visitors entertained during busier times. For us, at 6pm on a Monday, there wasn’t really a queue and we quickly reached the main event.
We found ourselves in a huge space - maybe 30,000 square feet - where animated versions of various Van Gogh works were being projected on the walls and the floor in amazingly high resolution. The entire space was filled with multi-coloured images and it was most certainly immersive.
All of Van Gogh's favourites were incorporated into the show which rolled from one animated version of a painting to the next. The publicity tells you to allow about 90 minutes to see the whole show and we stayed for about this time without seeing anything repeated. We saw many different works, including Sunflowers (of course), Bedroom in Arles, The Starry Night, Almond Blossoms and The Potato Eaters.
The animations cleverly bring everything to life. In Wheatfield with Crows, for example, the crows are show flying over the wheat. In the self-portraits, Vincent blinks.
Apart from this, it’s difficult to describe. So here are a couple of short videos I shot while we were being fully immersed, along with reminders of what the original paintings look like.
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| Van Gogh's Wheatfield with Crows... |
