DRIFT has realized numerous exhibitions and projects around the world. Their work has been exhibited at Biennale di Venezia (2015, 2022); The Shed (2021); Pace Gallery (2021), The Stedelijk Museum (2018); Victoria & Albert Museum (2009, 2015); Met Museum (2010); amongst others.
Their work is held in the permanent collections of the LACMA; Rijksmuseum; SFMOMA; Stedelijk Museum; and Victoria & Albert Museum. In 2017, DRIFT was awarded Dezeen Designer of the Year.
DRIFT
Living Landscape
The Tower
Main Gallery
From
to
Living Landscape is a unique interactive exhibition by Amsterdam-based artist duo DRIFT.
LUMA Arles commissioned DRIFT to conceive an immersive installation as an extension to the ambitious group show Van Gogh and the Stars on view at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles. The artists take inspiration from Vincent van Gogh’s unique approach to color, movement, and composition in his now legendary landscape paintings. The intense Provençale light played a key role in the radical transformation of the Dutch painter’s work, as he produced one masterpiece after another in Arles in particular. The vibrant colors of his paintings are characterized by an unearthly beauty. His idiosyncratic vision of nature and landscape forever altered the course of art. Inspired by van Gogh’s transformative use of color, DRIFT produced an installation that sheds light on his groundbreaking practice and the ways in which he paved new artistic paths for future generations.
Under the title Living Landscape, the exhibition brings together two of their most innovative, immersive and interactive artworks, Coded Nature and Murmuring Minds. Displayed side-by-side, the two artworks create a new and innovative environment, inviting audiences to participate in a performative composition where technology, people, and nature intertwine. Employing high-performing tools and advanced computational processes, Living Landscape becomes an environment that addresses the human experience in relation to sensorial and mechanical phenomena.
The exhibition explores relationality and movement, as well as the visible and the invisible nature of our surroundings, and the role that the different elements in nature play in relation to each other. Such notions were also central to van Gogh’s painterly explorations and surface through his canvases. The resulting installation by DRIFT activates senses and reveals the unseen layers of structures and patterns of interactions, as audiences enter and affect the evolution and manifestation of the artworks through their presence and choices. Beyond the immersive element, the installation is alive at every moment and presents many different layers through dialogue with human agency and its physical, collective, and psychological extensions.
Curatedy by Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, Director of Exhibitions and Programs.
DRIFT
Dutch artists Lonneke Gordijn (1980) and Ralph Nauta (1978) founded studio DRIFT in 2007. With a multidisciplinary team of 65, they work on experiential sculptures, installations and performances.
DRIFT manifests the phenomena and hidden properties of nature with the use of technology in order to learn from the Earth’s underlying mechanisms, and to re-establish our connection to it.
With both depth and simplicity, DRIFT’s artworks illuminate parallels between man-made and natural structures through deconstructive, interactive, and innovative processes. The artists raise fundamental questions about what life is and explore a positive scenario for the future.
All individual artworks have the ability to transform spaces. The confined parameters of a museum or a gallery do not always do justice to a body of work, rather it often comes to its potential in the public sphere or through architecture. DRIFT brings people, space and nature on to the same frequency, uniting audiences with experiences that inspire a reconnection to our planet.