Tour 10 of the world’s most beautiful galleries
From Berlin to Brazil and even Kazakhstan, these private art museums boast buildings as legendary as the art itself.
Some of the world’s leading private art museums are, well, artworks in themselves. Across the globe art collectors and commercial gallerists have enlisted top architects to create design-led spaces to hang their treasured pieces.
Tour the world’s best private galleries below.
The Almaty Museum of Arts, Almaty, Kazakhstan
When director of UK architectural studio Chapman Taylor, Chris Lanksbury, was approached to design Kazakhstan’s first private modern and contemporary art museum, he was intent on creating a grand space that mirrored the “relationship between the mountains and the dynamism of the city [of Almaty]”.
This relationship is represented through the building’s juxtaposing of limestone with angular aluminium structures, which reflects the museum’s location at the centre of the cityscape, while also being situated in the foothills of the Tian Chan mountains.
“The intention of the design was to provide the museum with a distinctive architectural character based on its important cultural purpose and its key position in the city,” says Lanksbury.
Kazak entrepreneur Nurlan Smagulov founded the museum, which opened in September and whose program will rotate through his extensive private collection plus 700 works from the Asian region.
Museu de Arte Contemporânea Armando Martins (MACAM), Lisbon, Portugal
Transforming a heritage building into a contemporary art museum is no small feat. Even more so when the project is an 18th-century Portuguese palace. For architect João Pedras, co-founder of design firm Metro Urbe, the greatest challenge was identifying architectural solutions for those areas with greatest heritage value. “We had two approaches: the first was to respect the palace’s heritage elements … the other was to design new spaces that [would feel] iconic,” says Pedras, whose studio also designed the museum’s adjoining five-star hotel.
The gallery, which displays the private art collection of Armando Martins, opened this year almost two decades after the Portuguese entrepreneur acquired the Palacio dos Condes da Ribeira Grande.
Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul de Vence, France
Fondation Maeght may have been France’s first private art gallery, but more than 60 years on, a glamorous expansion proves why it’s still the crown jewel of the French Riviera. To mark the six-decade milestone, the foundation – established by eminent French art dealers Aimé and Marguerite Maeght in 1964 – brought on Paris-based, Naples-born architect Silvio d’Ascia to create an extension to the gallery, used to house larger displays during the gallery’s busier summer months.
The minimalist new rectangular space utilises stone in the same colour as the original building to pay homage to the initial designs created by Joseph Luís Sert, the lauded Catalan architect who also masterminded Joan Miró’s art studio and Barcelona foundation. The recent expansion brings Sert’s vision of creating a hillside village of art to life, with the foundation’s prized permanent collection – including Modernists Alexander Calder and Alberto Giacometti – to be exhibited more frequently alongside temporary bodies of work.
Naoshima New Museum of Art, Naoshima Island, Japan
This year, renowned Japanese architect Tadao Ando marks his 10th project for the Benesse Art Site Naoshima, an initiative backed by the Fukutake Foundation. This new cultural institution joins a line of Ando-designed projects across the Seto Inlet islands, including the Benesse House Museum and Chichu Art Museum. It is solely dedicated to displaying contemporary Asian art, with its inaugural exhibition featuring works from Takashi Murakami and Do Ho Suh, among others.
The museum itself is built into the island’s hillside, with Ando’s design settling into the natural environment surrounding it – an architectural hallmark of his most recognisable buildings. The self-taught architect designs minimalist subterranean structures that balance the brutality of concrete with streams of natural light.
Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland
Being home to the contemporary art world’s largest – and most prestigious – annual fair makes Basel a fine candidate for beautiful museums. The Fondation Beyeler, with its architecture as intricately crafted as its Modern art collection, may just be at the top of that list. Swiss couple Ernst Beyeler, often referred to as Europe’s pre-eminent art dealer, and Hilda Kunz commissioned Italian architect Renzo Piano to design a permanent home for their collection after seeing his work on cultural institutions such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Beyeler’s vision for a single-level museum that saw his art collection harmonise with the natural surroundings of the Villa Berower estate led Piano to design a building that used volcanic rock from Patagonia to easily blend into the landscape. The Fondation’s growing collection, which includes works from Cézanne, Matisse and Monet, has led to expansion plans with Swiss-based Atelier Peter Zumthor at the helm.
The Feuerle Collection, Berlin, Germany
Art collectors Désiré Feuerle and Sara Puig bring their backgrounds as art historians with a specialty in ancient art to the Feuerle Collection, founded 10 years ago in a World War II telecommunications bunker.
Leading British architect and designer John Pawson spent two years transforming the vast underground space into a concrete labyrinth of minimalist exhibition rooms. Much like the history of the city in which it’s located, the museum’s architecture and impressive artwork collection bridges two worlds.
The Feuerle’s permanent collection holds Khmer Empire sculptures dating back to the seventh century and 2000-year-old Chinese scholar furniture alongside works from contemporary artists including Anish Kapoor and Cristina Iglesias.
Fenix Museum of Migration, Rotterdam, the Netherlands
Art and narrative combine spectacularly at the new Fenix Museum of Migration, a project located in a converted 1920s warehouse on Rotterdam’s Katendrecht Peninsula. Fenix’s defining feature is the Tornado, a 30-metre double helix staircase atop its roof. “Visitors can choose their own way up, making the staircase a symbol of a journey with many possible turns,” says museum director Anne Kremers. Stories of migration are told through a rapidly growing art collection, with Fenix’s inaugural exhibition, All Directions: Art That Moves You, putting forward a line-up that includes Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning and contemporary South African artist Thania Petersen.
The Frick Collection, New York, USA
An extensive renovation and the recent appointment of Aimee Ng to the role of chief curator sees one of New York’s most famed museums back on must-visit lists. The Frick, which is housed in a three-storey Beaux-Arts mansion on the Upper East Side, was established in 1935 to preserve American industrialist and art patron Henry Clay Frick’s extensive collection of Old Masters.
Its most recent expansion project repurposes the original Frick family home into a second floor of new galleries and restored heritage rooms. “We worked carefully to develop an architectural vocabulary for the project that is continuous with the existing historic fabric,” said principal architect Annabelle Selldorf of the new spaces. The expansion thankfully retained the Frick’s original design details including hand-carved wood panelling, decorative marble and bronze fixtures.
Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil
There’s few open-air museums as awe-inspiring as Inhotim, an art lover’s paradise set within a modern-day Garden of Eden in Brazil’s Belo Horizonte region. The 140-hectare estate is planted with more than 4000 species, with galleries dedicated to individual artists dotted across its grounds. Inhotim houses the private collection of Brazilian mining magnate Bernardo Paz, who opened his oasis to the public in 2006. Large-scale works by Yayoi Kusama, Olafur Eliasson and Hugo França are rivalled only by the architecture of the art pavilions themselves. For guests wanting to spend a night at the museum, the luxurious Clara Arte resort, which was originally designed by prominent architect Freusa Zechmeister and continued by Hemisfério Arquitetura following her death, was unveiled earlier this year.
Hauser & Wirth Menorca, Illa del Rei, Spain
A decommissioned British naval hospital on the Baleriac island of Menorca has found new life as an art centre by international commercial gallery Hauser & Wirth.
The restoration of the abandoned site, located on the small island of Illa del Rei in Menorca’s Mahon harbour was led by Paris-based, Argentinian architect Luis Laplace, a longtime collaborator of Hauser & Wirth.
It comprises eight galleries and an outdoor sculpture trail, where leading contemporary and modern artists’ works are frequently on display – think, a Louise Bourgeois spindly spider under an outdoor archway or Joan Miró’s fluid forms by the gallery garden.
The exhibition space opened in 2021, at which time Laplace said, “The spaciousness of the galleries, the restored arches and the skylights and windows pay an homage to [the island’s naval] origins.”
Conservation informs design, with tiles and terrazzo made on site using local Menorcan stone, and many of the original sandstone walls and wooden beams retained.
This story is from the November issue of WISH.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout