MONTREAL — This artistic theory is one museum visit you won't soon forget.

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts presents "Big Bang," a quirky collection of some 20 eclectic installations that aim to explore the artist's muse.

The concept is simple.

Selected contemporary artists were asked to choose a work from the museum's permanent collection and in turn interpret their own unique work of art. The topics range from music to fashion, sculpture to architectural design, and all artistic genres in between. The result is a poetic, colorful, jaw-dropping art experience that is not to be missed.

The exhibition opens with "Paul au Musee" ("Paul at the Museum"), artist Michel Rabagliati's comedic homage to the graphic novel. Here, Rabagliati offers 12 black-and-white drawings that chronicle the visit to the museum by a young boy named Paul. Rabagliati got his inspiration from thumbing through a guide to the museum as well as Auguste Rodin's sculpture "The Sirens."

"I imagined the first opening day of the Museum," Rabagliati writes in his "encounter," a short journal entry that each artist wrote to accompany the works. Rabagliati mentions well-to-do Victorian-era patrons who came to visit when the MFA first opened its doors in 1860. One such visitor is a bored young boy who wanders off.

The boy "noses around the Museum, looking at the works on view," Rabagliati said. "But it will be the live model art class on an upper floor that will leave him with the most lasting impression."

Indeed it will. By the last few panes of the series, little Paul is seen stumbling upon Rodin hard at work chiseling away a chunk of marble — as naked women pose as models. It's enough to make young Paul drop his ice cream cone in youthful surprise.

Artists Pierre Lapointe and Jean Verville tackle music and architecture with their simple but slightly claustrophobic installation "2000 et une realites." Their inspiration stems from a simple piece of furniture, the C2 Chair, a celery green design prototype created by French designer Patrick Jouin. Here, C2 stands out and stands alone, albeit dwarfed by some 30 columns of perfectly stacked everyday white plastic garden chairs piled about 50 chairs tall. Do the math — that's more than 1,500 chairs!

Juggler, acrobat and artist Jeannot Painchaud pays tribute to circus arts in "Souffle et Reminiscence," an installation inspired by Jean Paul Riopells's abstract oil painting "The Circus."

"The first questions that came to mind when I saw Jean Paul Riopelle's 'The Circus' were: What was he thinking about while he painted this canvas?" Paincahaud said in his "encounter" text. "What I see in this painting is the body's desire to express itself, the emergence of new shapes, effort and process … this painting breathes."

In turn, Painchaud breathes complimentary life into the abstract work with his dramatic circus-themed installation that features seven screens draped from the rafters portraying the likes of acrobats, trapeze artists and contortionists in action as the colorful Riopelle painting plays center ring to this circus stage.

Next, Claude Cormier takes on landscape architecture and urban design with "Tete(s) de Christ" ("Head(s) of Christ"), perhaps the most mismatched showdown of a staring match you've ever seen. Here, a 12th-century Romanesque sculpture of Christ's head found near Burgundy, France, is paired opposite a wall of hundreds of stuffed animals in every color of the rainbow.

"The incredible late-20th-century torsoless 'Head of Christ' disarms us with its intensity of its cruelly sightless, yet penetrating gaze," Cormier said.

That said, all eyes from museum visitors on hand seem to be on that hypnotic wall of plush toys.

Finally, you'll want to save some time to explore the kaleidoscopic and mesmerizing mural art supplied by En Masse, a Montreal-based drawing collective founded by artists Jason Botkin and Tim Barnard. With inspiration from A.R. Penck's resin painting "The Start of the Lion Hunt," the En Masse team of 31 artists turned an entire 40-by-20-foot gallery space into an innovative intertwining black and white mural art masterpiece dubbed "cartoon-tainted abstract surrealism."

"Big Bang" continues through Jan. 22.