The National Museum of Contemporary Art – MNAC

The National Museum of Contemporary Art – MNAC came into being in 2001 and opened its new venue at the Palace of Parliament in the fall of 2004. Since its opening, the museum has strived to exhibit and promote as many areas of interest from and for the Romanian contemporary art as possible, which also meant showing, often for the first time in Romania, the works of mainstream artists or art groups from abroad.

The exhibitions at the museum have included (and continue to do so) young artists alongside the most relevant names of contemporary Romanian and international art – from the newest to the most traditional media and forms of expression, from large thematic shows to monographic exhibitions or projects, from conceptual art to cartoons, as well as architecture, design and urban planning – sometimes surprising juxtapositions which attempt to map today’s cultural and artistic context.

The museum has also hosted and supported countless theater and contemporary dance events, shows, festivals and workshops. Since 2013, alongside the projects and temporary exhibitions program, the museum assigned a part of its spaces for a display of the museum’s collection which presented a selection of works (in partnership with the National University of Arts Bucharest) in the framework of the exhibition “Bucharest Artistic Education and Romanian Art after 1950”.

From fall 2015 the exhibition will be reset with works from the MNAC collection including locally less known Romanian artists from the Diaspora, who have been presented in large monographic exhibitions since the museum’s inauguration, such as Paul Neagu, Horia Damian and Andrei Cadere. The museum also has a special program for photography, as it has a remarkable collection of slides and negatives; the Documentary Department offers monographic data on over ten thousand artists, as well as thematic records and data bases which document the collection but are not limited to it.