Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art (Muzej Suvremene Umjetnosti) Tours and Activities

Opened in 1954 and originally located in a grand palace in Zagreb’s Baroque Upper Town, the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art (Muzej Suvrememe Umjetnosti or MSU in Croatian) relocated to its gleaming white, purpose-built home in 2010. The gallery was designed by architect Igor Franić and is found in Novi Zagreb, south of the River Sava and slightly out of the center of the city. Its collections are on three floors and feature masterpieces of Croatian modern art, of which around 600 examples are on display from a repository of 12,000 works dating from 1950 onwards. The sleek, white and airy exhibition spaces highlight the works of Croatian art movements that may be little known but are nevertheless worth visiting for their innovation and style. Masterly paintings by Josip Vaništa and Marino Tartaglia, and drawings by Milan Steiner intermingle with whacky installations, sculpture, videos and photography as well as computer-generated art from New Tendencies, an international art movement that had its foundations in Croatia.

Various guided tours of the treasures of the museum are available daily, and there is a sprinkling of interactive artworks that will appeal to children as well as futuristic spiral slides on which to zip downwards between floors, specially designed for the museum by Belgian artist Carsten Höller. The terraces around the museum also contain several bespoke installations and the whole edifice looks spectacular when floodlit at night.