MUVEC, the Civic Museums Foundation's new House of Contemporaries, opens in Mestre.

Mestre will inaugurate a new space dedicated to contemporary art on April 25, 2026: MUVEC - Casa delle Contemporaneità, a museum of the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, born from the renovation and transformation of the Muve spaces within the Candiani Cultural Center. The project involved an articulated architectural and conceptual intervention, aimed at redefining functions, paths and objectives of the structure, creating a two-story museum with a permanent collection and spaces for temporary exhibitions, with the intention of configuring itself as a new cultural reference point for the city and the metropolitan area.

The architectural layout gives the museum an autonomous and recognizable identity. The main entrance, facing Piazzale Candiani, is connected to an elevated walkway that leads to the new reception area located on the second floor. Here the exhibition itinerary of the permanent collection is developed, while the third floor houses temporary exhibitions. The articulation of levels allows a dialogue between stability and experimentation, between historical collection and contemporary practices, defining an approach that combines museum function and public experience.

From a cultural point of view, MUVEC proposes itself as a narrative museum of modern and contemporary art since 1948, basing itself on the civic collections preserved at Ca’ Pesaro and structuring a thematic itinerary that avoids a rigid chronological sequence. The narrative is developed along three lines: Reconstruction, Construction and Deconstruction, capable of reflecting the linguistic transformations of art in the second half of the 20th century and at the same time the urban and social history of Mestre, a city symbolic of Italian contemporaneity.

The museum offers two levels of interpretation. On the one hand, the international trajectories that passed through Venice and its territory; on the other, the artistic experiences developed in the mainland, in parallel with the transformations of the city. Concepts such as body, matter and city become interpretative tools capable of bringing into dialogue twentieth-century artists and more recent research, memory and the present. The permanent collection brings together works from the main movements of the second twentieth century and the new millennium, including Informalism, Spatialism, Minimal Art and contemporary practices dedicated to space and matter. The programming includes international protagonists as well as local artists, returning a complete picture of the vitality and complexity of the art scene.

MUVEC fits into the urban context as a contemporary museum, conceived as a cultural device capable of questioning the very meaning of contemporaneity. The decision to locate it in Mestre assumes strategic importance, giving the Venetian mainland a new centrality in relation to the demographic and social transformations of the territory. The facility addresses a diverse audience, including visitors, students, families and local communities, with a special focus on citizens of international origin. Layout, cultural mediation and exhibition programming are designed to foster an inclusive and participatory dialogue with communities.

MUVEC presents itself as an urban laboratory, a space for experimentation capable of confronting the challenges of the present and narrating a city in transformation. The museum also enters a cultural network including the Emeroteca dell’Arte, active from 2024, the Casermetta 9 of Forte Marghera, planned for 2025, and the future factory of Palaplip, contributing to the construction of a real district of contemporaneity. The official opening to the public includes a free admission weekend on April 25 and 26, with visits dedicated to exploring and learning about the new spaces, including history and artistic languages, literature and sound environments designed to restore a sense of contemporary time. Scheduled for Friday, April 24, is the opening of the group exhibition of the tenth edition of the Mestre Painting Prize, set up on the third floor in the spaces designated for temporary exhibitions.

Also on the third floor, from Sept. 26, a new exhibition dedicated to the themes and languages of the 20th century and their reverberation in current events will be on view. The exhibition titled Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka and the Body in Contemporary Art will build on the works of the masters of the Vienna Secession, analyzing the body as a mirror of the century’s anxieties and transformations, and will lead to reflections on contemporary art through works by ChenZhen, Vanessa Beecroft and Marlene Dumas.

MUVEC, the Civic Museums Foundation's new House of Contemporaries, opens in Mestre.

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