Van Gogh Basis celebrates ten years with a shape-shifting drone show and The Starry Night time

On the final day in Could, a constellation of 600 illuminated drones opened the 2024 season for LUMA and the Vincent Van Gogh Basis in Arles. Accompanied by Joep Beving’s melancholy piano music and the croaking of native frogs, the drones swooped and swirled like a flock of birds within the evening sky, shape-shifting, disappearing and reappearing, altering color, their glow mirrored within the chrome steel bricks of Frank Gehry’s tower. Specifically conceived for the event by the Amsterdam-based artists Drift, the efficiency was an homage to fellow Dutchman Van Gogh and his La Nuit Etoilée (Starry Night time over the Rhone). Painted in Arles in 1888, the masterpiece is now again within the metropolis for the primary time since its creation.

Uncover ‘Van Gogh and the Stars’

Van Gogh lived in Arles for 15 months, throughout which he was largely ignored or handled like a madman. However he was marvellously prolific, and his affect profoundly modified this place, together with artwork historical past itself. When Swiss artwork patron Maja Hoffmann began placing collectively her formidable cultural plans for Arles, and created the LUMA Basis 20 years in the past, her father insisted she not neglect Van Gogh’s legacy. In 2014, she broke floor for Gehry’s LUMA tower (whose structure was impressed by La Nuit Etoilée), on the identical time the Vincent Van Gogh Arles Basis opened its doorways close by, along with her father’s help. (She presently presides over each.)

For its tenth anniversary, the Van Gogh Basis managed to borrow La Nuit Etoilée from the Musée d’Orsay till the tip of the summer time – no straightforward feat. The portray anchors a superb present, ‘Van Gogh and the Stars’, which explores representations of the evening sky, the Nineteenth-century fascination with the cosmos, and the arrival of synthetic mild.

Past Van Gogh’s masterpiece, the exhibition’s co-curators have introduced collectively essential works by greater than 70 artists from 1861 to right now. Some, akin to Provençal painter Adolphe Monticelli, impressed Van Gogh, whereas others took inspiration from him. Among the many many highlights are a Spatial Idea by Lucio Fontana, with holes poked into the canvas for stars, a vibrant cartography of the sky by Augusto Giacometti in a telescope-shaped body, Helen Frankenthaler’s immense evening sky made liquid by her ‘soak and stain’ method, and Alicja Kwade’s cellular with heavy rocks.

The exhibition ends with a brand new work, Nebula Watcher, by French artist Jean-Marie Appriou: a bronze sculpture of Van Gogh strolling in classical contrapposto, his plaster head encased in a glass globe like an astronaut’s helmet. Appriou stated, ‘Rising up, when others had posters of Mick Jagger on their bed room wall, I had a poster of Van Gogh.’

Close by, the LUMA Basis launches its 2024 programme in two phases (the second beginning 29 June). The newly opened first section contains an interactive exhibition by Drift, a video set up by the American artist Diana Thater, and a four-decade survey of labor by Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija (which features a great contact: a person making Turkish espresso).

Like Van Gogh’s La Nuit Etoilée – by which the sunshine from fuel streetlamps appears to return from the celebs – quite a lot of these artworks additionally juxtapose nature and fashionable expertise. Thater’s poignant Sensible Results imagines a post-apocalyptic world the place the final being on Earth, a robotic, cares for topiary animals in a backyard. Ralph Nauta and Lonneke Gordijn, the couple behind Drift, merge science fiction (his obsession) and pure processes (hers). After researching the flight behaviour of starlings, the duo created two interactive artworks that use algorithms to imitate swarming. In a single, Murmuring Minds, a area of blocks slides throughout the ground in response to an individual’s actions, an unsettling expertise that makes the viewer alternately hunter and hunted.

A number of hours earlier than Drift’s one-time-only drone efficiency, referred to as Eternal Sky, the skies over Arles have been an unmistakable Provençal blue, and the evening promised to be starry. ‘This place may be very particular,’ stated Nauta. ‘When the solar goes down, the sunshine displays in town in essentially the most magical approach. You see it, and also you get goosebumps.’

Vincent Van Gogh Arles Basis’s ‘Van Gogh and the Stars’ runs till 8 September 2024 (although the mortgage of ‘La Nuit Etoilée’ ends 25 August) fondation-vincentvangogh-arles.org