A unique travelling exhibit of images from one of the world’s most famous painters, Vincent van Gogh, has its roots in a mesmerizing spectacle presented in vast abandoned quarries in France more than four decades ago.

The current show, Imagine Van Gogh: The Immersive Exhibition, opens in Vancouver’s Convention Centre this Friday (March 19) and runs until October 31. But the creative genesis of this walk-through extravaganza took place in Les Baux-de-Provence in Southern France in 1977, in a grandiose artistic exhibition within the limestone caverns and tunnels and on the walls and expansive rock slabs carved out of the district’s rocky hills.

That enveloping experience was the grand expression of an inspiration by French photographer and filmmaker Albert Plécy, who took two years to develop his concept of “Image Totale” and present it in an immersive audiovisual showcase called Cathédrale d’Images.

That combination of massive projected images synchronized to a musical soundtrack—splayed out on more than 4,000 square metres of living rock by dozens of visual and sound projectors—and encountered at a spectator’s own speed wowed the public. Forty-four years later, annual new shows in the open mines still draw crowds.

Imagine Van Gogh—which also opens in Edmonton in late March and then travels to Boston just before Christmas this year—combines sharp, detailed mammoth reproductions of more than 200 of the tortured Post-Impressionist painter’s works from three distinct creative periods: Arles, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, and Auvers-sur-Oise.

The exhibit is the creation of artistic directors Annabelle Mauger and Julien Baron, who previously collaborated on Cathédrale d’Images shows in France and immersive artistic experiences worldwide (including a new one titled Imagine Picasso).

Music from eight classical composers—including Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sergei Prokofiev, Camille Saint-Saëns, Erik Satie, and Franz Schubert—accompanies viewers strolling through neck-stretching galleries where original 70-centimetre paintings become seven-metre giants on towering screens that magnify every brushstroke.