You Can Now Wear the Eyes of Famous Portraits As You Sleep

Unlike art lovers, the subjects at the center of the world’s great masterworks have no need for shut-eye—and that’s the idea behind Belarus-based designer Lesha Limonov’s sleep mask project, “Masterpieces Never Sleep!” On the front of each sleep mask is a pair of eyes taken from a famous painting.

As designboom reports, Limonov created the masks for the International Rijksstudio Award. This year the competition asked participants to reinterpret pieces from the Rijksmuseum‘s art collection in Amsterdam and work them into their new designs. The artistic eye masks sample components from Frans Hals’s The Merry Drinker, Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck’s Portrait of a Girl Dressed in Blue, a Vincent van Gogh self-portrait, and more.

According to the video below, the project is based on a rather unsettling concept (in case wearing the eyes of a long-dead portrait subject wasn’t creepy enough):

“When night begins and the museum halls turn empty, the art masterpieces stay awake and look from the darkness. Till the morning they don’t close their eyes, monitoring what happens around.”

Good luck falling asleep with that image in your head.

[h/t designboom]