Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana
Slovenia's national museum of modern art, in Edvard Ravnikar's first major Ljubljana building.
Moderna galerija was established by government decree at the end of 1947 and opened to the public on 3 January 1948 as the Slovene national institution for modern and contemporary art. Its building on Cankarjeva street was designed by Edvard Ravnikar, whose plans date from the late 1930s; work began in 1940, stopped during the Second World War, when the shell was used as a store, and was only completed around 1951. The design shows both the classicising discipline of Ravnikar's teacher Joze Plecnik and the modernism he met in Le Corbusier's Paris studio.
The museum holds the national collection of twentieth-century Slovene art, shown in the permanent display 20th Century: Continuities and Ruptures, which runs from the Impressionists through the interwar avant-gardes and post-war modernism to conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s. Since 2011 the institution has also run the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, or MSUM, a second site in the former barracks quarter that houses the Arteast 2000+ international collection and a changing programme of contemporary exhibitions, performances and talks.
Highlights
- Permanent display 20th Century: Continuities and Ruptures
- Edvard Ravnikar's building, begun 1940 and finished about 1951
- Arteast 2000+ collection of eastern European art at MSUM
- Archive of Slovene avant-garde and conceptual art
