Nouvelles boîtes! engages explicitly with the architecture and the spaces of Kunstmuseum Luzern. The title of the international group exhibition plays on the name of the French architect Jean Nouvel, who designed the museum twelve years ago. At the same time the title Nouvelles boîtes! refers to the idea of the White Cube. The term ‘White Cube’ was first coined and used by Brian O‘Doherty in 1976, in the art magazine ‘Artforum’. O’Doherty was referring to the neutral, modern exhibition space that offers the ideal exhibition conditions for art, keeping the outside world away and allowing the art to speak for itself in isolation. In Lucerne, too, the French star architect realized this form of contemporary art museum for the then directorate. The primacy of the art works over the architecture was thus to be safeguarded. Jean Nouvel speaks of the ‘nudité des espaces’, and anyone who visits the Kunstmuseum Luzern will experience for themselves how difficult it is to find one’s bearings in the extraordinary abstraction of the exhibition spaces. The two unsupported halls are divided by a grid of walls whose doors provide a view of their full length and breadth. In this way Nouvel hoped to achieve the transparency of the whole building in the museum rooms as well. The result was that he created spaces, but not places. As perfectly as the architecture of the wall-grid retreats behind the art, it still remains problematic. Because some works require a specific space, without which they are unable to function. The group exhibition Nouvelles boîtes! brings together works that grant a sensory experience of the architecture. Works, most of them installations, which only function in an architectural context, which are unconnected to one another, but which, in the staccato of the individual rooms, adress the topic of the space itself.