GUSTAV KLIMT SHOW INSIDE THE HALL DES LUMIERES, DOWNTOWN, NEW YORK
Sandeep planned my visit to ‘Hall des Lumieres’, New York, on 14th August 2025. I arrived at Chambers Street, boarding the PATH train from Jersey City that took me to the World
Trade Centre (now known as One World Trade Centre). It is barely a 5-minute
train ride through the tunnel (known as the Hudson Tubes), dug below the bed of the Hudson
River that divides Jersey City from Manhattan, New York. After getting down at
WTC station inside the new white Oculus building, I walked about 1 km to the
City Hall on Chambers Street. The Hall Des Lumieres is located in the
basement and ground floor halls of a tower that once housed Emigrant Industrial
Savings Bank. The stone carving on the tower still displays the name of the
bank prominently. There is a well-known park nearby, known as City Hall Park. In case you come by Subway trains, the R and W trains stop at the City Hall Station, which is
just 300 yards away from Hall Des Lumieres. One can also travel to Chambers
Street by A, C, J, Z, 1, 2, or 3 Subway
trains. One can also come to the Brooklyn
Bridge using the 4, 5, 6 Subway trains and then walk for about 5 minutes to arrive
at Hall Des Lumieres. From Manhattan E WTC E Subway train also stops at WTC.
One can also come by bus and ferry.
Located inside building 49-51, Chamber Street, the entrance
tickets can be bought at the counter or procured online for 19 dollars. The
venue has wheelchair accessibility.
( Avtar Mota inside the Oculus building )
The Building.
In the middle of the 19th century, Ireland suffered the Great Famine. People started migrating to the US. New York became the home of the majority of the Irish seeking a better life. The Irish Emigrant Society, a charitable organisation focused on assisting immigrants, inaugurated the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank (now known simply as the “Emigrant Bank”) in 1850 to protect the funds of Irish immigrants. The bank opened in leased property at 51 Chambers Street in October 1850 and prospered. New quarters were erected on the site of the old building in 1858. The Bank continued to grow and successfully weathered the financial panic of 1873 when several other financial institutions collapsed. Built from 1909 to 1912, it is the first skyscraper in New York City in the Beaux-Arts style. At 187 feet tall and 14 stories high, the majestic hall was occupied by the bank until 1969. The elegant stained-glass windows are accompanied by white marble and limestone walls from Italy, punctuated by attractive bronze elements. The entire building was intended to reflect the power of the bank. The 'Teller Windows' are still there. I saw them on the ground floor near the entrance. In 1965, Emigrant Bank sold the building to the City of New York, which then utilized it for municipal office space. And then in 2013:l, The City of New York sold the property to The Chetrit Group for approximately $89 million US Dollars.
The Concept And the Men Associated With It.
Culturespaces, the French company that created the Atelier des Lumieres in Paris and
brought the concept to New York. Culturespaces is known for transforming classical
artworks into multi-sensory experiences using hundreds of synchronised
projectors, custom animations, and music. And Bruno
Monnier is a French cultural entrepreneur and innovator, the founder of
Culturespaces, a major private operator specialising in the management of
historic sites, museums, and immersive digital art centres since 1990. Monnier began his career at the French
Ministry of Culture, where he focused on remodelling the management of museums
and monuments. In 1990, he founded Culturespaces with the
mission to manage cultural sites and make them financially sustainable without
relying on public support while adding state-of-the-art visitor experiences.
NYC’s Hall des
Lumières has a French name because it’s modelled after the well-known French
art-immersive experience Atelier des Lumières in Paris. Halls Des Lumieres is a combination of French
and English words; while "Hall” is English and "des Lumières" is
French for “of the Lights.”
The man behind the Hall des Lumieres show is Gianfranco
Iannuzzi, an Italian-born creative director and creator of immersive
digital art. He has been producing large-scale art projections for over 30 years.
He works like a cinematic director of these exhibitions, right from the selection of
the artists to how best the digital projections can be scattered inside the
hall to present to the viewer something he has never seen, combining laser lights,
music, 3D projections, digital enlargements, colours, graphics and history. The viewer gets transported into a new world as paintings
shimmer, swirl with light to immerse and envelope him.
Culturespaces manages 11 establishments with 400 employees the world
over. Approximately 3 million visitors visit these centres every year. The space
used for presenting the shows is also used by the company for conducting
fashion shows, weddings, receptions, corporate events, and music shows. I was informed that Culturespaces is a consortium
now.
The Show
At the Hall des Lumieres, yes — every artist whose work is shown
there has their art digitised so it can be projected. They create their
immersive shows with high-resolution
digital projectors (often hundreds of them), paired with
surround sound. The ‘lights’ in the name refer to projected images and animations
filling the walls, floors, and ceilings, not laser beams like you’d see at a
concert. So it’s more like being inside a giant animated painting than inside a
rave. Paintings, drawings, or prints
are scanned or photographed in ultra-high resolution. The images are then
animated, zooming in on brushstrokes, making elements move, layering effects,
etc. The original physical artworks are not present; you’re seeing a digital
interpretation created by a design team. So, whether it’s Van Gogh,
Klimt, or contemporary artists, what you see there is a reimagined, projected
version, not the original canvas hanging on the wall. I was told that
the main immersive exhibitions held at the Hall could be listed as:-
- Gustav Klimt – (The Immersive Golden Experience )
- Marc Chagall
…(Paris
– New York)
- Wassily Kandinsky – (The Odyssey of Abstraction )
- Hip Hop ‘Til Infinity – (An Immersive Digital Experience
celebrating hip-hop)
- Infinite Horizons –( Another Immersive-themed show)
- Destination Cosmos: The Immersive Space
Experience – (Created
in partnership with NASA)
The Gustav Klimt Show
Gustav Klimt (1862 – 1918) was an
Austrian painter and one of the foremost figures of Vienna’s fin-de-siècle art
scene. He’s best known for his ornamental, symbolist style that combined
figuration with lavish use of gold, patterns, and ornament. Born near Vienna into a modest
family, his father was a gold engraver, which influenced Klimt’s lifelong
interest in gilded surfaces. In 1897, he co-founded the Vienna
Secession, a group of artists who broke away from conservative academic art to
explore modern, international styles (including Symbolism and Art Nouveau).
Klimt became its first president. He often explored sensuality,
femininity, allegory, and the cycles of life and death. Many of his works
caused controversy. Klimt is regarded as one of the
most iconic modern painters who bridged 19th-century academic traditions with
early 20th-century modernism.
Gustav Klimt's show in New York has
been designed differently from the Paris version. In NYC, the curators have
added an introductory sequence about immigration because of the building itself.
So, as the show starts, the viewer is shown the story about immigration to the
US with people arriving in huge ships to NYC and crowds moving in the streets and
avenues seeking shelter.
The story of immigrants in New York
creates an impressive backdrop to Klimt’s golden world and a great idea of
linking the venue’s immigrant history with the universal themes of movement,
change, and cultural flourishing before transitioning into the art. As the show
progressed, Klimt’s paintings weren’t just hanging on a wall; they were alive,
surrounding me on every surface, floor to ceiling. I saw golden mosaics sparkle
as if lit from within, pictures turning and moving slowly, forms expanding outward
like they were breathing. Notable works like The Kiss, Beethoven Frieze, Judith and the Head of
Holofernes, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, Pallas Athena, The Tree of Life, A
Village Landscape, The Black Feather Hat, and many more filled the space, dissolving into
flowing colours and reappearing on the massive walls, pillars and floor. It also included Klimt’s
sketches, photographs and decorative works. At moments, flowers drifted across the floor, architecture
and Viennese art nouveau details unfolded, and the music carried the images as
if the whole room was part of a dream. The immersive display makes use of the Beethoven Frieze as a
way to connect to Klimt’s work on the Vienna Secession building and the larger
decorative environment. Further, gold textures, spirals, and floral
ornaments from his works are isolated and animated to move across the
architecture. The show runs with a curated soundtrack (Beethoven, Wagner,
Chopin, Mahler, and others) that links to Klimt’s Viennese cultural milieu. Hence,
it’s not only paintings, but also drawings, design motifs, architectural
references, archival material, and a music-driven immersive environment.
In the basement of the Hall des Lumières, which was once the vault of
the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank, one finds a completely different, highly immersive
world. The bank’s original vault
has been transformed into a mirrored prism-like
chamber, featuring a single screen at the front to create a mesmerising infinite-mirror effect, immersing you in an expansive, almost
otherworldly visual space—an “infinity illusion” of swirling abstract shapes
and fractals that seem to move all around you. A memorable contrast to the
grand, gold-drenched shows upstairs.
‘Gustav Klimt: The Immersive Experience’
show will be running for a limited time from July 15 through August 31, 2025.
Based on a work at http:\\autarmota.blogspot.com\.
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