EXPLORE MAGRITTE ONLINE

A website for site for New York's Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition, “Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary”, brings the artist’s breakthrough Surrealist years to digital life with sound, typography and animation inspired by the avant-garde movement.

Everything on the site - including the font, layout, colours, animation and sound - is inspired by the years from 1926 to 1938. The result is an avant-garde digital space that recreates the mood of this crucial time in Magritte’s creative growth, when he first emerged as a strong influence in the Surrealist movement.

Hello Monday created the online platform which brings the museum experience online, allowing the user to discover contextual information and extra details that give a sense of how the pieces came to life. It also integrates conservation information such as the x-rays, infrared imagery and video that have given curators insight into René Magritte’s process and painting technique.

Users can also unearth the sketches hidden beneath a portrait, or a swath of paint along an exposed canvas edge that suggests an earlier version.

Hello Monday also built sound panning into the site. The soundtrack shifts with the movement of the mouse, so when the cursor is on the right-hand side of the site, the music shifts to the right speaker, or right ear, if you’re wearing headphones, and pans to the left when you move the cursor left.

“Bringing together some 80 paintings, collages, and objects, along with a selection of photographs, periodicals, and early commercial work, the exhibition offers fresh insight into Magritte’s identity as a modern painter and Surrealist artist. A richly illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition,” says MoMA on the exhibition