Danubiana, Bratislava

The Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum, one of the most romantic museums of modern art in Europe, is located 20 kilometers south of Bratislava, the capital of the Slovak Republic. It was founded by Gerard Meulensteen from Eindhoven, a Dutch collector and patron of the arts, and Vincent Polakovič, a Slovakian gallery owner.

Since the opening of the museum in 2000, dozens of exhibitions of the most renowned personalities of the Slovak, European and global art scene, such as Joan Miró, Sam Francis, Karel Appel, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Lucebert, Walasse Ting, Antoni Clavé, Martín Chirino, Markus Prachensky, Ilona Kesserü Ilona, Jozef Jankovič, Rudolf Sikora, Vladimír Kompánek, Miroslav Cipár, Vladimír Popovič and others have been organized here.

We were honored by many visitors from home and abroad, including H.M. Juan Carlos I of Spain and his wife Sophia, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, Queen Sonja of Norway, Albert II, Prince of Monaco and Princess Mona of Oman as well as countless celebrities.

Danubiana © Danubiana

The unique location of the Danubiana on the borders of Slovakia, Hungary and Austria and its harmonious combination of museum architecture and the surrounding Danube landscape offer visitors unique views of the works of art and the flora and fauna that change with the seasons.

The sculpture park features works by renowned artists such as El Lissitzky, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Jim Dine, Hans van de Bovenkamp, Jozef Jankovič, Arman, J. C. Farhi, Vladimír Kompánek, Rudolf Uher and others.

Danubiana, Sculpture Park © Danubiana

The museum roof offers a unique view of Bratislava, the Little Carpathians and the majestic Danube, especially at sunset. The most renowned tourist guides and social portals recommend that visitors take a tour of the museum and its magnificent extension, which was completed in 2014 with the generous support of the government of the Slovak Republic.

The Meulensteen Collection
Gerard Meulensteen, the founder of the Danubiana Museum, began collecting modern art in the second half of the 1980s. His first acquisitions included works by artists from the experimental CoBrA group, whose influential figures such as Karel Appel, Constant, Lucebert and Eugen Brands were Dutch. He later met Walasse Ting, the Chinese-American painter, and acquired several of his works. This friendship led him to the work of the American abstract artist Sam Francis.

Jozef Jankovič (SK), Left and Right, 1992

However, his passion for collecting grew immensely after he met Kiro Urdin, the Macedonian painter who was living in Paris at the time. His subsequent visits to art fairs and modern art exhibitions in Europe and the USA led to a steady growth of his collection, which he saw as an investment in beauty and happiness, especially after acquiring artists such as Claes Oldenburg, Christo, Corneille, Pierre Alechinsky, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Paul Jenkins, Hans Van de Bovenkamp and others. His interest in Slovakian art was awakened when he met the Slovakian gallery owner Vincent Polakovič in 1994. Since then, he has been one of the largest foreign art collectors in this region. Today, the Meulensteen collection forms the core of the Danubiana's permanent collection. These pieces are loaned to the museum free of charge for 20 years while it builds up its own collection. Today, the almost 200 sculptures and paintings in this collection change regularly.

danubiana.sk