Enter the National Gallery of Victoria’s “Pierre Bonnard: Designed by India Mahdavi” the exhibition feels like entering a quilt-like Post-Impressionist entertainment house in its dynamic patchwork of galleries. THE buzzed exposureco-organized with the Musée d’Orsay, presents a remarkable selection of paintings from the end of the 19th century by Pierre Bonnard as well as a selection of works by his contemporaries, all in a colorful scenography resembling a living room designed by Mahdavi.

View of the installation ‘Pierre Bonnard: Designed by India Mahdavi’ 2023. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Photo by Lillie Thompson.

Through artful cutouts that echo the window motif favored in the French artist’s paintings of interiors, visitors experience sprawling views filled with pattern, layered to dizzying effect. “The whole show is about being immersive; nabi artists wanted to take you into a world where you can be surrounded by art rather than just looking at it,” says the award-winning French architect and designer of Iranian-Egyptian origin. Derived from the Hebrew word navigation meaning “prophet”, the Nabis – a late 19th century movement of artists that included Bonnard – ushered in a new era of design-based art, ranging from furniture to commercial illustration.

Creating impactful, art-filled environments has become Mahdavi’s calling card. In 2014, she was asked to design The Gallery in Sketch London – arguably Instagram’s most iconic restaurant – which she transformed into a pink haven to juxtapose the graphic yet whimsical works of British artist David Shrigley. The design was such a success, Mahdavi’s three-year project took eight years to complete, and in 2022 he was asked to redesign the space to complement the British-Nigerian artist’s quilts, sculptures and masks. Yinka Shonibare.

The Gallery at sketch, London, 2014 Photograph © Thomas Humery

Mahdavi’s bubblegum velvet Charlotte armchairs, made famous by the sketch, are among his furniture dotted throughout the Bonnard exhibition, which opened in June for a four-month run. ‘Pierre Bonnard’ is the latest of NGV’s Melbourne Winter Masterpieces, a series of exhibitions that aims to draw tourists to Melbourne during the off-season months. It was organized in collaboration with the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, which holds the largest collection of works by the artist. From numerous public and private collections, it presents more than 100 pieces by the Nabi titan known for his luminous palette, as well as by his contemporaries, such as Édouard Vuillard and Félix Vallotton. Organized chronologically, the exhibition traces the evolution of Bonnard’s subject as it moves from the urban Paris of the 1890s, encapsulated in street and theater scenes, to the south of France, where from the 1920s it focuses on natural landscapes and quiet moments at home.

View of the installation ‘Pierre Bonnard: Designed by India Mahdavi’ 2023. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Photo by Lillie Thompson.

To make Bonnard’s work, which encompasses painting, photography and the decorative arts, more accessible to Australian audiences, NGV enlisted Mahdavi to design the scenography for the exhibition – and, indeed, the pair are undeniably a marriage made in polychrome paradise. The conversation started five years ago when NGV executives visited his Paris workshop. After viewing the catalog of the museum’s groundbreaking 2018-2019 exhibition, “Escher x nendo | Between two worlds,” in which Japanese design studio nendo responded to the work of Dutch artist MC Escher, Mahdavi was immediately inspired. “It was a very unusual and avant-garde combination,” says Mahdavi, an admirer of the two creative forces. “It was a new way to have a conversation between art and design.”

View of the installation ‘Pierre Bonnard: Designed by India Mahdavi’ 2023. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Photo by Lillie Thompson.

The mixture of art and commerce in the context of the museum was also particularly new to Mahdavi – almost all of his furniture in the exhibition is available for purchase through his showroom. For nearly a decade, auction houses have employed interior designers to create vignettes (both digital and real) that fuse the art and objects they wish to sell. However, for a major museum to give such an important voice to a contemporary creator (not just in the scenography but even in the very title of the exhibition) is audacious – and perhaps the future.

View of the installation ‘Pierre Bonnard: Designed by India Mahdavi’ 2023. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Photo by Lillie Thompson.

“In major art museums, especially those with huge collections of 19th century art, I’m sure [the extent to which we incorporated Mahdavi’s vision] would be considered a little sacrilege. Many museums are concerned about the over-presence of someone else in the room next to the artist,” says Miranda Wallace, senior curator of international exhibition projects at NGV. Perhaps a sign of a changing landscape, the Musée national Picasso-Paris opened this spring a Picasso exhibition under the artistic direction of British designer Paul Smith. “The freedom we gave India and the way she responded to Bonnard through the environment she created fits perfectly with the nature of her work. It’s not a forced complementarity.

“Like Bonnard, I always work with my own color memory,” explains Mahdavi, who recounts how her nomadic childhood, during which she moved from “technicolor” America to Germany, “a lost paradise of color where everything was black and white,” was instructive on his aesthetic. Because Bonnard only worked from memory (he sketched a scene after the fact and jotted down notes recalling the lighting at a specific moment), Mahdavi is inspired by the artist’s “distortion of reality”, reflected in his particular palette, his flattened perspectives, and scenes mixing interiors and exteriors from different places. “In the same way that there is a abstract value in Bonnard’s paintings, the exhibition is conceived as an abstraction of a house,” says Mahdavi. Incorporating his own furniture was a tactic to give NGV’s vast galleries a more domestic scale. Bonnard invited guests to his home.”

View of the installation ‘Pierre Bonnard: Designed by India Mahdavi’ 2023. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Photo by Lillie Thompson.

Especially since his early years, many of Bonnard’s works are small in size. “To give him a bigger voice” and demonstrate the distinctive way he produced “vibrations through pattern”, Mahdavi extracted details from wallpapers and modes in his paintings, manipulated them by computer and made them explode as a backdrop for the exhibition. “We wanted people to understand the strength and modern value of his art,” says Mahdavi of the put in abyss effect. The patterns of the carpets are also taken from the interiors of the painter. Extensive use of Mahdavi patterns, complemented by solid walls in vibrant colors, also recall the typically fully carpeted houses of Bonnard’s era without feeling old and stuffy.

“We know people love immersive experiences, but how do you make a meaningful connection between environment and work? says Wallace about bringing historical artwork to new audiences. “The ambition is to transport people on a conceptual and intellectual journey through time, as well as an artist’s worldview.” Given the endless creative possibilities Bonnard’s homes offered for his art (his bathroom alone is the setting for dozens of photographs and portraits of his wife, Marthe), the association of Bonnard’s work with a contemporary interior designer makes sense; the choice of the daring but shrewd Mahdavi is what makes this exhibition escape the gimmicks. Intentionally with very few digital components, the show serves as a reminder that spectacle and immersion can be achieved without flashy technology. In this regard, NGV’s “Pierre Bonnard” is a much-needed antithesis to the trend of soulless shows based on projections à la Klimt and van Gogh.

View of the installation ‘Pierre Bonnard: Designed by India Mahdavi’ 2023. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Photo by Lillie Thompson.

“Bonnard said that ‘museums are filled with homeless works,’ explains Wallace. “With the India exhibition, Bonnard’s works take root in fertile and appropriate ground because it is this notion of looking at and appreciating the surroundings.The enjoyment of the details of the painting comes to the fore and gives them a fresh feeling.

Regarding the cadence of shows featuring an outside collaborator, Wallace believes NGV manager Tony Ellwood is “very keen to push the envelope with Melbourne Winter Masterpieces”, and that “we will be looking for opportunities where there is there is a subject that allows us to really engage”. with design because it’s such a fundamental part of this institution. However, “having the right couple is not necessarily an annual thing”.

“As a museum, we are increasingly challenged to diversify what we offer,” continues Wallace. “If we’re going to do a show about a European man from the 19th or 20th century, the question becomes ‘how can we also make sure that we present something that wouldn’t have been done 30 years ago?'”

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