Tate Modern’s Modigliani show was the  largest ever UK retrospective of the painter and sculptor’s work. It brought together 100 artworks from throughout Modigliani’s career – including 40 that had never before been shown in the UK.

The exhibition also included Tate Modern’s first VR experience. Created in partnership with HTC Vive as part of its Vive Arts programme, the Ochre Atelier transported visitors to Modigliani’s final studio in Paris. Visitors could look around the studio – examining paintings, sketches and even Modigliani’s bed – while listening to audio commentary from experts at Tate and first-hand accounts from people who knew the artist.

The experience was designed by games and VR studio Preloaded and aimed to capture the feeling of being in the studio in 1919. “We wanted it to feel as if he had just left the room,” says Phil Stuart, Creative Director at Preloaded. “The thing [VR] does brilliantly is it can take you back to a place or it can make you feel a certain way by putting you into almost the perspective of a person. So what we wanted to do was go back to that moment in time [1919]… and give context to his paintings.”

Preloaded designed Modigliani’s studio using first-hand accounts and photographs of the space. It was created to scale using measurements of the building. The experience was filled with evocative details. Smoke rises from a cigarette resting in an ashtray, water drips from a roof into a bucket on the floor and a fire gently burns in a furnace in the corner of the room. You could also hear a neighbour playing music in the flat below.

Every object in the space was also meticulously researched. A chair shown in the room closely matches one from one of Modigliani’s paintings while a furnace was based on a sketch drawn by one of his friends and one found in a neighbouring building.

Preloaded also recreated two Modigliani paintings in VR using technical research compiled by three museums (Tate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in São Paulo). This research provided a detailed analysis of paint thickness, brush patterns and colours used in the original paintings and allowed Preloaded to recreate both artworks – Jeanne Hebuterne 1919 and Self-Portrait 1919 – in great detail.

The studio spent almost five months working with Tate’s research and conservation teams to create the experience. “Tate were in conversation with HTC for about a year looking at where they could utilise VR within the gallery experience,” explains Stuart.

“One of the great things about the Modigliani exhibition [was] that there’s no estate, so it allowed us to recreate paintings in a different form,” he continues. “If it was [a Picasso exhibition] we’d never have had that opportunity because the estate would lock it down or it would be too expensive. So in terms of usage Modigliani was the perfect one for this.”

Stuart says the aim was to create an experience for the broadest possible audience, many of whom who might never have tried VR before. Interaction was limited – users were sat in a chair and could glance around the room to look at paintings or objects but they could not touch things or walk around the space. This removed many of the complications that people often encounter when trying VR for the first time, such as bumping into things or getting stuck in the corner of a room.

There is no narrative as such – instead, the experience offers “a snapshot” of Modigliani’s life at the time.

View all the winning work from The Annual 2018 here. 

Entrant/Creative Agency: PRELOADED, Client: Tate.