Oslo’s National Museum of Norway, the largest museum in the Nordic countries, has unveiled its new building before opening to the public on 11 June.
Located on Oslo’s waterfront, the new museum merges four of Norway’s major art and design institutions under one roof. It covers an area of 54,600 square metres and has 13,000 square metres of exhibition space.
“With this new building, Norway now has a modern museum with classic qualities, a new home for Norway’s largest collection of art, architecture and design,” said Karin Hindsbo, director of the National Museum.
“It enables us to show more of the collection than ever before, with spaces for temporary exhibitions of entirely new formats on an international scale. It is a building that will be filled with events and activities.”
Designed by architect Klaus Schuwerk, the institution is bigger than international museums such as Rijksmuseum and Guggenheim Bilbao. It houses 6,500 works of art, architecture and design across 86 exhibition rooms.
The collection contains 400,000 objects, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, textiles and furniture. The building also includes a space for temporary exhibitions, an open-air roof terrace, cafés, a shop, and the largest art library in the Nordic region.
“Museums are places that invite us to think critically about the power of images, but they are also places of pause and reflection,” Hindsbo added.
Largest museum in the Nordic countries
“Our vision is to make art accessible to each and every person, and to reflect our times and the society in which we live. If we succeed in doing this, we believe that the museum could be the most important meeting place in society.”
Highlights include a collection of works by Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, including The Scream. Other works in the collection include paintings by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.
The National Museum’s inaugural exhibitions are ‘I Call It Art’, ‘The Pillars’, and ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’.
The new museum is designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 percent compared to current building standards.
Images: National Museum of Norway
