8 properly amazing museums opening in Europe this year

As if to embody the sheer ridiculousness of German history, a baroque landmark has sprung from the rubble, 80 years after it was last seen in Berlin. The Humboldt Forum is a reconstruction of the Berlin Palace, a former home to Prussian kings and German emperors. It was damaged during World War II, then torn down and replaced with the East German parliament building. The latter was also demolished, following reunification in 1990 – and now the original palace has risen again.

Centred around three main courtyards, the building on the city’s Museum Island will now house four floors of exhibition and performance spaces, along with shops, restaurants and office space. The museum is opening in stages, with the ground and first floors already open, and the ethnological and Asian art museums on the second and third floors set to open this summer. And even if you’re not interested in the priceless artefacts, there’s another big draw: the rooftop restaurant and terrace with 360-degree views.

Paris sure isn’t short on art galleries, but the reimagined Bourse de Commerce is something else entirely. Billionaire François Pinault hired Japanese architect Tadao Ando to turn this former exchange building near the Centre Pompidou into a vast contemporary art space – including a 300-seat basement auditorium, a projection room and a very fancy restaurant run by father and son Michel and Sébastien Bras. The museum is due to open later this spring and will eventually host 12 exhibitions a year.

‘Scream’ dude Edvard Munch still looms properly large over the Norwegian art scene, so it’s only appropriate that a brand-new 13-storey Munch Museum will soon dominate Oslo’s waterfront. The building’s 11 galleries will display the world’s largest collection of Edvard Munch artworks, alongside exhibitions of Munch-adjacent modern and contemporary artists.

Due to open in autumn, the museum will also hold a bar, a fjørdside café and a top-floor restaurant with spectacular views over the Norwegian capital. Best of all, an unusual double-height gallery will be the perfect fit for Munch’s rarely displayed monumental paintings.

Like contemporary art? Love eerie industrial spaces? Us too. Well, this disused power station on Moscow’s central Balchug island will soon be home to a labyrinthine (and incredibly stylish) complex of exhibition spaces, cafés and restaurants, plus a shop and theatre.

A new base for art nonprofit the V-A-C Foundation, GES-2 has been redesigned by Centre Pompidou architect Renzo Piano, no less, and will open with a site-specific project by Ragnar Kjartansson. The Icelandic artist’s inaugural takeover will involve a series of exhibitions, film screenings and performance pieces themed around ‘Santa Barbara’, the first American soap to be broadcast on Russian TV following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The complex opens in late summer or autumn.

The former Geffrye Museum in London has been closed for refurbishment since January 2018, but it’s finally set to relaunch this May under a new name: the Museum of the Home. Housed in a set of eighteenth-century almshouses, this East End institution has for more than a century offered a vivid physical history of the English domestic interior – perfect for anyone as obsessed as we are with scrolling through online property listings.

Displaying original furniture, paintings, textiles and decorative arts, the old version of the museum recreated a sequence of typical middle-class living rooms from 1600 to the present day. The revamped MOTH will have double the amount of exhibition space, with new exhibits including a Victorian room, a display of ‘revolutionary’ everyday objects and a 1970s room. Groovy.

The Provençal city of Arles is known for two things: art (Vincent Van Gogh painted 200 canvases here) and a remarkable range of well-preserved Roman monuments, including a vast, Unesco-protected amphitheatre. Now a huge new cultural complex called LUMA, founded by local art collector Maja Hoffmann, aims to pay homage to all that history.

Designed by Frank Gehry, it’s a stone-and-glass structure that draws inspiration from the amphitheatre, attached to a huge aluminium-clad tower referencing the limestone cliffs that surround the city. When it opens this June, the main complex will contain a series of public exhibition spaces, with artist studios and workshops lining the tower. A public park, the Parc des Ateliers, will open in the grounds at the same time. If Arles wasn’t on your art-hub map already, this should do the trick.

Chances are you’re already pretty familiar with the tales of ‘The Snow Queen’, ‘The Ugly Duckling’ and ‘The Little Mermaid’. But a new museum in Denmark aims to tell all those magical stories anew – through immersive exhibits, gardens, and a series of sound and light installations.

Hans Christian Andersen, the Danish author responsible for more than 100 fairy tales (and, indirectly, a whole truckload of Disney movies), grew up in the then-rural town of Odense before moving to Copenhagen as an adult. This vast new complex draws upon his fondness for the surrounding landscapes, with concave roofs topped with hanging flower gardens and narrow wooden columns that create the impression of an indoor forest.

The attraction will also be home to a café and an underground museum. An opening date is pencilled in for summer.

Lisbon’s Royal Treasury Museum has been 225 years in the making. It’s housed in the brand-new west wing of the Ajuda National Palace – a part of the building which was first planned in 1796, but never built thanks to centuries of financial and political problems. In 2018, an updated design was finally approved – and when the museum’s maximum-security doors open in June, it’ll house an astonishing array of royal bling, including the crown jewels of the former Portuguese monarchy. Or most of them, that is: much of the project has been funded from the insurance on the six jewels that were stolen from the Netherlands in 2002.