Emotions

Art is often invested with emotions. Depending on the context, works of art – paintings and sculptures, but also photographs and videos – are likely to trigger reactions that mirror the viewer’s personal emotional state.

This exhibition focuses on various emotions such as love, joy, grief and longing in painting and photography. For this purpose, it gathers a selection of 17th to 19th-century works from the three collections of the Villa Vauban alongside photographs from the 1990s and beyond from the collection of the National Audiovisual Centre (CNA). The resulting interaction of various modes of presentation, perspectives, materials and forms allows visitors to discover new and surprising aspects in the works of the Old Masters and in the contemporary photographs.

Since the dawn of time, art has been addressing timeless questions related to man’s existence. In the exhibition visitors are given the opportunity to experience and question their own feelings in dialogue with the works.

The paintings in this exhibition, which includes works by Jan Steen, Giovanni Antonio Canal, aka Canaletto, Paul Delaroche and Alexandre Calame, cover a wide range of pictorial genres, from portraits and genre scenes to landscape and history paintings, thus reflecting the scope of the collections of the Villa Vauban. The contemporary photographs in this exhibition were produced as part of projects organised by the CNA in collaboration with young artists from Luxembourg and abroad.

The exhibition also provides visitors with documentation in a dedicated room, where they can learn more about the history of the Villa Vauban, its redevelopment into a museum and its collections.

Emotions, which is on display in the historic part of the building, will be shown alongside the upcoming temporary exhibitions.