State of the art journeys

As culture re-emerges from the pandemic, Laura Fowler looks at some exciting ventures that are set to open this year

Seeing art has become a virtual pursuit for much of the past year, with exhibitions and openings put on hold. So in 2021, as the cultural world re-emerges, a constellation of starchitect-designed projects are set to finally open, including several major new modern art galleries in Europe – masterpieces worth making a postlockdown trip for.

PARIS

First to open will be the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection (boursedecommerce.fr). Between the Louvre and the Pompidou Centre, the circular 18th-century stock exchange has been restored and dramatically reimagined by Tadao Ando as a showcase for François Pinault’s 20th and 21st-century art collection. Ando, who also worked with Pinault on his Venice gallery Palazzo Grassi, has installed a round exhibition space in trademark hole-punctured concrete within the neoclassical building’s ornate rotunda, pale and delicate as creme patissiere, crowned with a 19th-century mural painted around the cupola. The inaugural exhibition is already installed and waiting to be revealed to the public, as soon as France’s cultural venues are permitted to open. Until then its contents will remain a secret, though the French billionaire’s 10,000-strong collection includes works by the likes of Picasso, Mondrian, Koons, Twombly and Hirst – so expectations are high.

MENORCA

Hauser & Wirth Menorca (hauserwirth. com), the innovative gallerists’ eagerly awaited island outpost in the port of Mahón, will finally open on July 17. Together with art-world architect Luis Laplace, they’ve restored a set of 18thcentury outbuildings of a former naval hospital on Isla del Rey to create an eight-gallery arts centre for 20thcentury masterpieces. As at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, sculpture will also be installed in landscaped gardens (including a Louise Bourgeois iron spider in a meadow of wildflowers), with native planting by Piet Oudolf, and there will be a restaurant.

OSLO

On Oslo’s regenerated waterfront, Munch (munchmuseet.no) is a new 13-storey museum dedicated to the Norwegian artist. When it opens this summer, it will contain 11 galleries’ worth of more than 26,000 works by Edvard Munch, including two versions of The Scream, as well as his poems about it, alongside thousands more writings, personal belongings and photographs. The futuristic, energy-saving museum, clad in recycled aluminium, will contain additional galleries showing other artists, plus public workshops, restaurants and a rooftop bar.

ELSEWHERE

In Germany, Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie (smb.museum) will reopen this August, following a six-year renovation of Mies van der Rohe’s 1960s icon; while Herzog & de Meuron’s modern art Museum Küppersmühle in Duisburg reopens in March with a whopping extension.

Meanwhile, in New York, the Frick Madison (frick.org) is set to open on March 18, temporarily rehousing its Rembrandts, Titians, Turners, Vermeers and Gainsboroughs in the Whitney’s former Madison Avenue home for two years (while its historic buildings on East 70th Street undergo renovation), along with Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s previously unseen series The

i Showcase: Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection; below, Munch museum