FX.co ★ Top 8 stunning museums of contemporary art

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is a museum of modern art designed by Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry. It is located on the Nervion River in Bilbao. It is famous for its twisting glass-and-steel volume with a unique chrome-plated metal coating. The museum exhibits many masterpieces of modern art, which makes it a mecca for contemporary art lovers. Notably, thanks to art investments, the economy in Bilbao experienced a boom. Architects and economists have called this phenomenon the "Bilbao effect".

Niterói Contemporary Art Museum, Brazil

The Niterói Contemporary Art Museum was designed by local architect Oscar Niemeyer. The building is made in the form of a disk with a ring of panoramic windows and resembles a spaceship. The museum is located on a cliffside above Guanabara Bay, which offers a picturesque view of Rio de Janeiro and Sugarloaf Mountain. In its permanent exhibition, there is a private collection of 1,217 works belonging to Brazilian art dealer Joan Sattamini. He has been collecting art masterpieces for 45 years. Paintings by local artists are also displayed there.

Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art, South Africa

The shape of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art resembles a bunker. It is located in Cape Town. Its premises are a reconstructed grain silo that has been transformed into a museum. The museum displays works of contemporary African artists and national diasporas. It is believed to be one of the largest museums on the continent. After enjoying the works of modern art, visitors can stay at the Silo Hotel in Cape Town, which occupies the upper floors of a former elevator above the museum complex.

Graz Art Museum, Austria

The unique and futuristic design of the Graz Art Museum was created by English architects Colin Fournier and Peter Cook. The museum was built in 2003 as part of the "European Capitals of Culture'' program. As a result, the museum of an unusual shape, built in the style of blobitecture, became a landmark of Graz. BIX is the 900 m2 light and media installation in the façade of the Kunsthaus in Graz. It is able to program the façade like a computer monitor and broadcast projections or animations into the urban space. Graz Art Museum often hosts international exhibitions of interdisciplinary and contemporary art.

Pompidou Centre, France

The Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou is the brainchild of architects Richard Rodgers, Renzo Piano, and Gianfranco Francini. The amazing building was designed in the architectural style of structural expressionism. This approach focuses on factory aesthetics and a large central space. The Pompidou Center "literally turned the world of architecture upside down and inside out," architects said. In this structure, all communications, ventilators, the main escalators, and most technical services are placed on the outside. The Georges Pompidou Center is the first museum of modern art not only in Paris but also in Europe. This is one of the most visited museums in the world. It has the second-largest collection of contemporary art in the world, after the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

Museum of Modern Art, New York

The Museum of Modern Art in New York displays the world's largest collection of avant-garde and postmodern art objects. Its impressive collection includes the works of Van Gogh, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, and Warhol. MoMA's evolving collection contains almost 200,000 works from around the world. The building of the Museum of Modern Art is not distinguished by whimsical forms. Yet, its collection makes an art lover shutter. Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi redesigned the Museum of Modern Art. “The model for MoMA is Manhattan itself. The Sculpture Garden is Central Park, and around it is a city with buildings of various functions and purposes. MoMA is a microcosm of Manhattan,” he stated.

Soumaya Museum, Mexico

The private Sumaya Museum, located in Mexico City, has over 66,000 exhibits. The major part of the art collection consists of European artists and sculptors. It is named after Sumaya Domit, the wife of Carlos Slim, the founder of the museum. In 2011, a new building of the Soumaya Museum was designed on Plaza Corso in Nuevo Polanco. Mexican architect Fernando Romero made an exuberant contribution to its development. The new museum complex includes a library, a restaurant, and a 350-seat auditorium. The museum is a six-storey building with a height of 46 m. The facade of the museum, which is covered with 16,000 hexagonal aluminum tiles, has a complex shape.

Denver Art Museum, US

The Hamilton Building closes the top 8 unusual museums of contemporary art. This is a perfect example of deconstructivist architecture designed by Frederick S. Hamilton. The building is part of the Denver Museum of Art (DAM), which displays contemporary European and African pieces of art, as well as exhibits from Oceania. The Hamilton Building's multifaceted geometric design includes 20 inclined planes covered with titanium panels. The unique feature of the structure is that these panels are neither parallel nor perpendicular to each other. In 2019, the Denver Art Museum received an impressive collection of Claude Monet’s canvas, more than 125 paintings.