Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb
Croatia's largest contemporary art museum, in a 2009 building in Novi Zagreb by Igor Franic.
The Museum of Contemporary Art traces its origins to the City Gallery of Contemporary Art, founded in 1954 and long housed in the cramped Kulmer Palace on the Upper Town. After decades of planning it moved in 2009 into a purpose-built home on Avenija Dubrovnik in Novi Zagreb, designed by the Croatian architect Igor Franić. The long, raised block is wrapped in a glazed and perforated skin and lifted above an open ground level, giving the museum roughly 15,000 square metres of floor space across several exhibition levels.
Its holdings run to some twelve thousand works and concentrate on Croatian and international art since the mid-twentieth century, with particular strength in the Exat 51 and New Tendencies movements, conceptual practice of the 1970s and media art. The collection is shown through the long-running cycle Collection as a Verb, which is rehung in segments rather than as a fixed display. A separate branch, the Vjenceslav Richter and Nada Kareš Richter Collection, occupies the architect's own villa elsewhere in the city.
Highlights
- Igor Franić's raised, glazed 2009 building beside Avenija Dubrovnik
- Carsten Höller's Double Slide running through the atrium
- Collection as a Verb, the museum's rotating permanent display
- Strong holdings of Exat 51, New Tendencies and 1970s conceptual art
