“The sight of stars always makes me dream,” Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) wrote in one of his many letters to his brother Theo. Even at the time he had been admitted to an institution in the South of France, he enjoyed painting and drawing the starry night skies that he saw there.

That’s how his famous painting, Starry Night (1889), now one of the most iconic images of a night sky in art history, came about. Van Gogh’s swirling starry night, featuring a small hillside village and a large cypress tree in the foreground, is not just made up of a black surface with pale dots. Instead, he used ferocious brushstrokes in bright blue and contrasting yellow tones – colours that he is now famous for.

As expressive as Van Gogh’s Starry Night once was, it was no longer often seen in that way—especially in cities, where the night sky was permanently washed in orange light. Architects Ivana Jelić and creative engineer Pavle Petrović, who collaborated on art installations, presented a radiant yet artificial version of the starry sky as Van Gogh once saw it.

The hillside village and trees were replaced by the urban landscape where the piece was exhibited, and the brushstrokes were reimagined as 1,400 ghost staffs—acrylic tubes illuminated by small LED lights. The electric lights evoked, in a paradoxical way, the natural beauty that is now largely missing from city skies.