Winner of Montreal’s annual Musée Des Beaux-Arts, the large-scale mural ‘Moving Dunes’ by Canadian design firm NÓS has bought a Montreal street to life with its bold patterns and colours.

‘Moving Dunes’ encourages guests to move around the installation and observe how the carefully-placed reflective spheres and geometric shapes amplify the patterns and multiply the points of view. As the guest moves throughout the installation they witness the street transforming as shapes are reversed and the ground comes alive. Its curvy lines combined with san toned colours creates a striking effect on the space and an unforgettable experience for guests.

In creating ‘Moving Dunes’, NÓS was inspired by the plastic approach of Cubist painters, who questioned the role of perspective in visual representation. They drew on the concept of anamorphosis, which is the distortion of the subject reconfiguring itself according to the position of the body in space. The end result of the installation puts a playful twist on this approach with the creation of large ‘ripples’ that manipulate the street surface, its aim to reflect the features of a body or face.

A challenge the mural faced was creating a pedestrian public space that also allowed access to emergency vehicles. Producing an experience that had high-media impact while on a limited budget was also among one of the issues the installation faced.

Images by Olivier Bousquet, Eloa Defly, Raphaël Thibodeau, Alex Lesage, and Charles Laurence Proulx via Designboom.