Guggenheim Abu Dhabi To Open December 11
4July 29, 2026
Nearly twenty years after it was first announced, the long-awaited Guggenheim Abu Dhabi has finally revealed an opening date of December 11. The new modern and contemporary art museum in the United Arab Emirates’ capital was designed by the late Pritzker Prize-winning architect Frank Gehry and is the latest addition to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s network of institutions across New York, Bilbao, and Venice.At over 800,000 square feet, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will be the largest Guggenheim institution, housing thirty galleries and approximately 125,000 square feet of interior exhibition space. The building’s exterior is an unconventional assemblage of ten sculptural cones clad in stainless steel mesh, onyx, and glass, rising up to 280 feet into the sky. It is also the most expensive museum within the network, coming at an estimated cost of over $1 billion, per the New York Times. Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak, chairman of Abu Dhabi’s department of culture and tourism said in an official statement that the institution “is a defining moment in our cultural journey.”The museum will focus on art from the 1960s onwards, and it has been assembling a collection since 2009. Instead of a chronological sequence of exhibits, the galleries will be divided thematically into sections with titles such as “Abstractions,” “Popular Culture,” “Land,” “Language,” and “Storytelling,” which as stated in a press release, represent an invitation for visitors to engage with art “on their own terms.” Mariët Westermann, director and CEO of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, said in a statement that the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi “will be a source of wonder, a hub of connection, and a place of curiosity and joy for people from the United Arab Emirates and the world.”The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is the latest in a crop of cultural institutions that have materialized within Abu Dhabi’s multi-billion dollar Saadiyat Island cultural district, including the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Zayed National Museum, and the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi. Over its two-decade construction period, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and other Saadiyat Island projects have also come under fire from human rights groups regarding the exploitation of migrant construction workers who face inhospitable living and working conditions in the United Arab Emirates. Related Matters of Spirit: Two Los Angeles Exhibitions Attempt to Locate the Spiritual in Contemporary Art Betye Saar, Leading Figure of the Black Arts Movement, Dies at 99