Skull + Monarch Auctions + Galleries is an online gallery and auction site featuring some of the finest artists around, including legendary rock photographer Mick Rock and sculptors Randy Doering and Anthony Moman. The gallery also features a series of up-and-coming creatives from the worlds of fine art, fashion, photography, and videography. 

When COVID-19 and the resulting pandemic occurred in early 2020, the majority of the public were forced to stay home in lockdown, eradicating all in-person event opportunities, including the ability to attend art gallery exhibitions. Originally designed to be a standard e-commerce art gallery and store, Skull + Monarch intended to do something about this, and sought out dataTV for ideas. We suggested implementing virtual technology to offer the visitor a series of three-dimensional galleries to peruse, designing an online experience allowing site visitors to virtually “walk” through each gallery, utilizing the mouse at 360° angles and creating the feeling of touring an actual gallery environment, even though they were stuck at home.

The experience is great on a desktop or laptop, but it’s on a mobile device where it really shines. Using a mobile device to tour the gallery, how the user manipulates the phone or tablet around the display changes as if they were actually moving their body around the physical space. Besides viewing the artwork, tours can be set up in multiple rooms, offering videos on demand of the artists describing their work, their bios, and other information.

And being an e-commerce store, the galleries all link up to the artist’s respective product pages, allowing customers to purchase the artwork, with various size and frame options available.

dataTV was incredibly proud to be part of this project, the virtual galleries visually being some of the most exciting work we’ve done to date.