ZWOLLE.- Flowers bloom, colors shift and digital organisms appear and disappear in response to the people moving through them in Digital by Nature, a major exhibition devoted to French artist Miguel Chevalier at Museum de Fundatie.
The exhibition brings together nearly 120 works and is the largest survey of Chevalier’s work in Europe to date. It is also his first major solo exhibition in the Netherlands.
Chevalier, widely regarded as a pioneer of digital art, has spent more than four decades exploring the possibilities of computers as an artistic medium. Rather than using technology simply as a tool, he treats it as a creative partner, establishing rules, colors and forms while allowing algorithms to introduce unpredictability and change.
That approach is most visible in four large interactive installations at the center of the exhibition. As visitors move through the galleries, their presence alters the images around them. Patterns shift, digital forms grow and dissolve, and colors change in real time. No sequence is repeated in exactly the same way, turning each visit into a slightly different experience.
Sound is equally important. Chevalier’s longtime collaborator, composer Jacopo Baboni Schilingi, has created electronic scores that evolve alongside the imagery and respond to the movements of visitors.
Nature provides the exhibition’s central visual language. Chevalier draws inspiration from flowers, coral, crystals and microscopic marine organisms, translating their structures and rhythms into digital environments. The result is a body of work that sits somewhere between the organic and the technological.
Alongside projections and interactive installations, Digital by Nature includes sculptures, robot drawings, machine-made embroideries, tapestries, videos and objects drawn from natural science collections. Several works were created specifically for the exhibition.
Chevalier’s interest in digital art began in the early 1980s, when access to sufficiently powerful computers was rare. He worked at night on machines in a Paris research center after scientists had finished using them during the day, creating fully digital works decades before virtual reality and AI-generated imagery became familiar parts of contemporary culture.
His work has since developed from experiments with pixels, binary codes and algorithms into large-scale environments that bring together technology, nature and human movement. Art history also remains an important source of inspiration, with influences ranging from Marcel Duchamp and Jean Tinguely to Claude Monet, Diego Rivera and Nam June Paik, as well as early computer artists such as Vera Molnár and Catherine Ikam.
“What makes Miguel Chevalier’s work so special is the way he connects art history and technology, as well as nature and algorithms,” said Beatrice von Bormann, director and executive board member of Museum de Fundatie. “In his installations, these worlds come together and visitors literally become part of the work.”
The exhibition originated at Kunsthalle München, where it was presented from September 2025 through March 2026. For its presentation in Zwolle, the project has been expanded and adapted with additional elements.
Chevalier’s work will also move beyond the museum galleries later this year. For fourteen days in December, Pixel Waves will appear across the facade of Museum de Fundatie, marking the first time his work will be shown simultaneously inside and outside a museum.
The broader autumn program at Museum de Fundatie also explores the relationship between nature and technology. In DEEP DIVE, Natalia Domínguez Rangel transforms the museum’s De Wolk space into an underwater-like environment of glass, ceramic and metal sculptures accompanied by a specially composed sound installation. The exhibition examines humanity’s relationship with the oceans, including issues such as underwater noise pollution.
Meanwhile, Diana Scherer is creating Symbio, a nine-meter-high installation in which plant roots grow through specially designed textile structures. Using soil, seeds, water, light and templates, Scherer explores the boundary between control and chance, as well as the meeting points between art, biology, nature and technology.
Digital by Nature: The Art of Miguel Chevalier opened October 3 at Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle.
