Royal Highland Centre, Edinburgh
Nov 25th, 2025
Edinburgh’s Royal Highland Centre is a long-standing complex built for showcasing. We travelled late afternoon to go to a very special event to enjoy Beyond Monet that is an immersive experiment highlighting the artist. It was accessible by car so you can avoid the mile walk from bus stop to venue.
The complex has many large building’s, ware house size, and we were welcomed to the main showroom, where Money’s art and life come to a great appreciation for his levels and styles. Early sunsets, the time of year, meant it was quite dark when we got there.
Our group of reviewers and press, started to file in, we chatted looking forward to what was for me a first at a technologically driven happening. This was the tours first trip to Scotland, choosing Edinburgh, having literally toured the globe to bring attention to the said artist.
First you are greeted with a room that made our introduction to art, Monet’s time, his profound thoughts and enigmatic gestures, what he did for the movement of impressionism at the time. There was a lot of love in the room and I took in their detailed information often using his quotes and feeling’s, I found that his art was so precious to him that it tore him apart on more than one occasion.
We had just walked a darkened corridor with large flower placements, it felt like a steady beginning to this new-found art of immersive entertainment. Artistic frames hung empty from the ceiling of this massive building, a building used to and made for presentations including, sellers’ markets. I sighed at the beauty of the artists and how he is being celebrated by this amazing travelling event.
You walk into his famous (legendary) garden with a cut to size model of his bridge. Money himself said, he would be no-where with out it, and we are reminded of his lily works of 8 in a room, large and all wonderful.
The whole exhibition involves him and Van Gogh, it is absolutely fascinating to compare the two giants who helped create what we call Modern Art. The evenings experience came to its penultimate room, we stepped into it and immediately forgot ourselves.
In a room big enough to build a space rocket there was no art hung on the wall but everything was covered, there were two high pillars square with light and shadow shapes that forever moved. The whole room in fact moved but only in sensation as we were kind of taken out of fact. But this didn’t mean Monet’s facts were lost, far from it they were submerged in this tidy immersive experience.
Movement for example was highly in focus, and before I forget the show used close ups of his colours and strokes, and every wall, bit of space and floor was involved in this interesting psychological effect.
Where movement meant great joy and love, we took it in as little children taken in by its spectacle. What was at play felt like some mystery, explaining far beyond explanation of what it took to be the artist and how we shed a tear at the trials he and other Impressionists fate faired.
Having concocted what, I feel is the greatest period of art and painting to date (just an opinion), the life size model bridge was almost like you could talk to the guy. It felt somehow sad and melancholy but that was for the heights he made as an artist and a great human being looking at life itself through paint.
Words: Daniel Donnelly
Photos: Anastasia
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