Curated by Jean de Loisy and Bice Curiger, assisted by Margaux Bonopera and Maurine Roy, it featured Starry Night over the Rhône, painted by Vincent van Gogh just a few metres from the Fondation in September 1888, as its centrepiece. The exhibition explored the visual culture of Van Gogh’s era and examined similarities between this work and those of later artists including Alicja Kwade, Anselm Kiefer, Dove Allouche, Edvard Munch, Georgia O’Keeffe, Helen Frankenthaler, Kazimir Malevich, Lee Bontecou, Tony Cragg, Yves Klein, and others.
The screen-printed typographic layout of the cover and inner chapter pages pays homage to the first edition of Histoire du ciel [History of the Sky], written by French astronomer Camille Flammarion (1883). The cover also reproduces a sketch of M13, a globular cluster of several hundred thousand stars, sent to Lord Rosse, an amateur astronomer who built a giant telescope on his Irish estate and discovered the galaxy M51 in 1845. Some believe his drawings of spiral galaxies inspired Van Gogh’s Starry Night.