The Guggenheim, a new museum in Abu Dhabi

The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will be a preeminent platform for global contemporary art and culture that will present the most important artistic achievements of our time. Through its permanent collection, exhibitions, scholarly publications and educational programs, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will promote a truly transnational perspective on art history, and is being developed in collaboration with The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation which, since its founding in 1937, has promoted the understanding and appreciation of art, architecture, and other manifestations of visual culture, primarily of the modern and contemporary periods.

The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will move beyond a definition of global art premised on geography by focusing on the interconnected dynamics of local, regional, and international art centers as well as their diverse historical contexts and sources of creative inspiration. In realizing this endeavor, the museum will acknowledge and celebrate the specific identity derived from the cultural traditions of Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emirates, as well as other countries comprising the Middle East, even as it pioneers a novel, visionary model that will redefine the art-historical canon.

The landmark structure housing the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi was designed by world-renowned architect Frank Gehry (at the same time author of the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum, among other famous buildings), who describes his composition for the building as “intentionally ‘messy,’ moving into clarity.” The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will have spectacular views of the Saadiyat Cultural District and Arabian Gulf.

Open to the elements, the Guggenheim’s cones recall the region’s ancient wind-towers, which both ventilate and shade the museum’s exterior courtyards in a fitting blend of Arabian tradition and modern design.

Visitors will enter the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi through one of the cones, covered on the exterior with panes of blue glass and defined on the interior by a dynamic structure of wooden timbers.

Just off the soaring glass atrium are workshops and a 350-seat theater, where the museum will offer a wide-ranging educational and performing-arts program. The state-of-the-art facility will allow for a wide variety of live events including lectures, panels, symposiums, music recitals, dance and theater productions, film viewings, and performances. Galleries, many unprecedented in scale, are distributed around the atrium on four levels connected by glass bridges above. The museum features approximately 12,500 square meters of gallery space in the monumental piles of gallery boxes, and 11 iconic cones provide a further 18,000 square meters of exhibition space.

Nine of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi’s ten blue cones will also be accessible from the atrium and galleries. In each of these cones, the visitor will have the opportunity to view unique, site-specific artworks by leading contemporary artists. Clad in translucent honey-colored stone, the eleventh cone rests high above the atrium, weaving together the interior and exterior of the building.

About the curatorial concept, The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will build a permanent collection, organize exhibitions, generate scholarship and undertake educational programs that will examine the history of art produced around the world since the 1960s from a variety of perspectives. The permanent collection display and temporary exhibitions will both recognize unique contributions to art history and underscore the interconnected dynamics and fundamentally transnational nature of contemporary art practice. Major art-historical movements will be surveyed through the lens of a transnational understanding of world cultures. A dynamic program of changing exhibitions will explore common themes, formal affinities, and other key relationships among the work of artists across time and geography.

Artists will be invited to produce site-specific commissions for the collection and exceptional spaces of the museum building. In addition, the museum will be a catalyst for scholarship in a variety of fields, chief among them the history of art in the Middle East in the 20th and 21st centuries.