Step into a dimly lit third-floor exhibition hall at the Wisconsin Center in downtown Milwaukee, and you’re transported to 19th-century Giverny, France, where world-renown impressionist painter Claude Monet spent the last two decades of his life producing some of his most iconic works.
Make your way through the Garden Gallery to brush up on the artist himself before entering the exhibit’s main event: the Infinity Room. Here, you’ll see 400 of Monet’s masterpieces woven together over a 35-minute loop that is projected onto every surface of the space.
“Beyond Monet: The Immersive Experience” is designed to make visitors feel as if they have stepped inside one of the impressionist’s paintings to experience the natural landscape of a water lily pond, a poppy field or a stack of hay – from his perspective. The multimedia display is set to an original score that helps tell the story of each scene.
“It’s a really unique way of seeing his work,” said Fanny Curtat, an art historian with the exhibit. “We are used to seeing him on chocolate boxes and mugs and stuff like that, but there is so much more to him. … It’s about putting the audience in the middle. The gift of his work, he says, is self-abandonment.”
The 50,000-square-foot travelling exhibit is expected to draw tens of thousands of visitors during its run through Jan. 8, according to the Wisconsin Center District. It follows the successful run of “Beyond Van Gogh,” which sold nearly 200,000 tickets over seven months last year, emerging as the highest grossing event in WCD’s history.
