The 5 Galleries

According to Alvar Aalto’s original designs for the Museum, the upper floor was intended to contain all the galleries. Today there are 5 individual galleries in Kunsten, four aboveground and one under.

In Kunsten, the inner flow, and accordingly the movement of visitors, proceeds in a circle around the high-ceilinged central gallery, the Main Gallery in the centre of the Museum and on to the Sky-lit Galleries and the Side-lit Galleries, exactly as Alvar Aalto had envisaged back in the 1960s.

Originally there were only four galleries – but the restoration of the Museum in 2014-2016 involved the addition of an exhibition space on the lower floor, the New Gallery. This created an even better flow through the floors of the building, so that the café, workshops and exhibition galleries became even more closely connected.

Most of the Museum’s galleries are named after the way that light functions in them. The light is significantly different from gallery to gallery, varying according to the position of the windows, the points of the compass and the season.

Read more about the individual galleries below