The biggest museum in Croatia, across the river, with a working slide down the side of it.
The Muzej suvremene umjetnosti opened in 2009 in Novi Zagreb, south of the Sava, and it is the largest museum building in Croatia.
Putting it there was a deliberate decision — an attempt to give the postwar half of the city, which has around 120,000 residents and almost no cultural institutions, something of its own. Whether that worked is argued about; the museum is undeniably harder to get to than anything in the centre, and it is undeniably the most ambitious cultural building Croatia has put up since independence.
The building
Designed by Igor Franić, it is a long, elevated, white slab on piers with an open ground level beneath it, wrapped around an internal street.
It is 15,000 square metres, cost a great deal, took over a decade to build, and looks like nothing else in the city.
The collection
Around 12,000 works, focused on Croatian and international art since the 1950s, with particular strength in the movements that came out of this region.
EXAT 51 and New Tendencies — Zagreb was an unexpectedly important centre for geometric abstraction and early computer art in the fifties and sixties, and the New Tendencies exhibitions here from 1961 were among the first anywhere to take algorithmic art seriously. This is the part of the collection that international curators come for and that almost no visitor knows about in advance.
Gorgona, the Zagreb conceptual group. Julije Knifer, who painted the same meander motif for forty years. Ivan Kožarić. Sanja Iveković and the Yugoslav feminist conceptualists.
Plus a rotating temporary programme that is more variable.
The slide
Carsten Höller’s Double Slide is a permanent installation running down the outside of the building. It is part of the ticket and you are expected to use it.
It is fast, it is genuinely fun, and it is one of the few pieces of contemporary art anywhere that visitors talk about on the way home without irony.
Practical
Tram 6 or 14 across the Sava. About fifteen minutes from Ban Jelačić Square, and the trams are frequent.
Admission is charged and is inexpensive by western European standards. Check the closing day.
Allow two to three hours, and combine it with a walk around the blocks of Novi Zagreb, which are a serious piece of socialist urban planning and the reason to be on this side of the river anyway.
More Museums
Museum of Broken Relationships
Objects donated by strangers, each with the story of the relationship it survived. Far better than it sounds.
Mimara Museum
A vast donated collection with a genuine question mark over how much of it is what it says it is.
Croatian Museum of Naive Art
Paintings on glass by farmers from a village in Podravina, and the only museum of its kind in the world.