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The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will open its doors on December 11 after almost two decades of waiting.
Nearly 20 years after the project was first announced, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi now has an opening date. The new modern and contemporary art museum will open to the public on December 11 in the capital of the United Arab Emirates, culminating one of the most ambitious cultural projects of recent decades.
Designed by the recently deceased Canadian architect Frank Gehry, the building will join the international network of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, alongside the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the New York museum.
With a surface area exceeding 74,000 square meters, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will be the Guggenheim Foundation's largest institution. The complex will feature thirty galleries and approximately 11,600 square meters of indoor exhibition space, designed to host programming focused on modern and contemporary art practices.
Building status in December 2025.
The museum's architecture maintains Gehry's distinctive style, with a composition of ten large-scale conical structures clad in materials such as stainless steel, onyx, and glass. These sculptural volumes, some reaching a height of 85 meters, create a monumental building integrated into the cultural landscape of Saadiyat Island.
The project, with an estimated investment exceeding one billion dollars, will also become the most expensive museum construction in the Guggenheim network. For Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak, Chairman of the Department of Culture and Tourism of Abu Dhabi, the opening represents "a defining moment" within the emirate's cultural strategy and reinforces its ambition to become an international benchmark for contemporary art and thought.
The museum's collection, begun in 2009, brings together works created from the 1960s to the present, with a global perspective that seeks to establish connections between different geographies, cultures, and artistic movements. In contrast to the traditional chronological model, the exhibition will be organized around major thematic axes such as Abstractions , Popular Culture , Land , Language, and Narrative , presented as open spaces for visitors to develop their own relationships with the works.
Mariët Westermann, executive director of the Guggenheim Foundation, has defined the new museum as a space intended to generate 'wonder, connection, curiosity and joy', both for the people of the United Arab Emirates and for visitors from all over the world.
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