A look inside the Gustav Klimt immersive experience at the Hall des Lumières

Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank, the oldest savings bank in New York City, has transformed into a giant new center for custom-designed immersive art experiences dubbed Hall des Lumières. Located across from City Hall Park, the revamped destination just opened this week on Wednesday.

The new center’s inaugural installation will focus on beloved Austrian painter Gustav Klimt.

“Gustav Klimt: Gold in Motion” is described as a “thematic journey through the golden, sensuous and revolutionary art of the Viennese painter.” The project is the work of Gianfranco Iannuzzi, who was also behind one of the many immersive experiences focusing on Vincent van Gogh that took over social media feeds and to-do lists this past year. 

Guests who enter the beautiful, historic building will be enraptured by a number of glowing, animated, 30-foot-high custom displays of images from celebrated paintings, synchronized to an original soundtrack and mapped to the marble walls, towering columns, stained glass skylights and coved ceilings.

The primary installation will be accompanied by a slew of other experiences as well, including a shorter, complementary digital presentation of the works of Friedensreich Hundertwasser, a Klimt successor, an exploration of the history and design of the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank itself and a display of Klimt paintings shown at actual scale.

A clear bet on the recent popularity of all things immersive, the project is headed by Culturespaces, a leading private manager of museums and cultural heritage sites in France—and the company behind famed Paris art center Atelier des Lumières.

Overall, the 1912 landmarked building, also one of the first skyscrapers built in the Beaux-Arts style, has been renovated to accommodate its newest function. Culturespaces has announced that a total of 33,000 square feet of space was restored. It certainly serves as quite a beautiful canvas for Klimt’s art.

Filed under: Headlines by Wendy Jackson
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