CASINO LUXEMBOURG – CONTEMPORARY ART CENTRE

Ideally located in the heart of the capital, the Casino Luxembourg holds contemporary art exhibitions with an international programme of mainly younger-generation artists. The art centre houses public spaces with a variety of uses and vocations, combining today’s art with a warm and friendly meeting place: the ground floor, next to a bookshop and a library specialising in contemporary art, has an area dedicated to learning activities and a café-restaurant. The first floor is exclusively used for temporary exhibitions, so artists’ monographs and themed exhibitions are shown here. These are completed by a varied programme of guided tours, conferences, concerts, and workshops.

Permanent display

As a contemporary art centre, Casino Luxembourg is dedicated exclusively to today’s art and focuses on artistic production, not on the collection of works of art. However, certain artworks – some of them very discreet – have embedded themselves into the building and its environs over the years. Some of them subsequently vanished beneath coats of paint or were victims of sundry renovations. Other clearly luckier ones have survived. Such is the case with Nedko Solakov’s A Wise Thought in a Circle and Jacques Charlier’s La Surface de l’Art. Still other works were specially commissioned for exhibition, which is the case with Zeitgeist: Karl Cobain by Claudia Passeri, Beautiful Steps #10 by Lang/Baumann, and Zäit Wuert by the artist collective LAb[au]. All these works are now part of Casino Luxembourg’s permanent display.

Current exhibitions

More information

Architecture

The “Casino Bourgeois” was built in a central area of the capital by architects Pierre Kemp and Pierre Funck from 1880 to 1882. It soon became a cultural and social hotspot in the city of Luxembourg. In the middle of the 20th century, the State purchased the building and rented it out to the Cultural Circle of the European Communities, founded in 1954. The Casino Luxembourg, hereafter called the “European Foyer”, will remain until the end of 1990 the centre of cultural and social events of the European Community in Luxembourg. During the preparations for Luxembourg, European Cultural Capital 1995, the transformation of the former “Casino Bourgeois” into an exhibition venue was entrusted to Urs Raussmüller. In March 1996, three months after the end of the cultural year in Luxembourg in 1995, the Casino Luxembourg became what it is today: a Contemporary Art Forum.

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain in 2016, the public spaces on the ground floor and the exhibition rooms on the first floor have been redesigned. Today the art centre houses public spaces with various uses and vocations, combining today’s art with a warm and friendly meeting place.

 

Architect(s)

The Casino was built in 1882 by Luxembourg architects Pierre Kemp and Pierre Funck. In 1959, Luxembourg architect René Mailliet had built the glass and steel pavilion onto the building’s south front, known today as the “Aquarium”. In 1995, the architect Urs Raussmüller transformed the “Casino Bourgeois” into an exhibition space and incorporated the white cubes into it without affecting the historical substance of the building.

The architect Claudine Kaell was entrusted with the mission of the architectural transformation of the Casino’s ground floor in 2016. Her project provided for a more pragmatic and more fluid reorganization of the interior spaces and better accessibility for the public (with an additional entrance on the Boulevard Roosevelt side). The ground floor has a redesigned reception area next to the existing library, exhibition spaces, educational activities space, and a restaurant.

Programme at Casino Luxembourg