Museum Kampa will celebrate the third anniversary of its opening

Prague - The Kampa Museum, located in the former Sovovy Mlyny watermills, will celebrate its third anniversary on Friday with an open day. The gallery spaces will be open until 8:00 PM, and guided tours of the museum and the current exhibition of Joseph Beuys will be provided for interested visitors. The museum also marks its three-year anniversary with extended opening hours in September and October, when it will be open every Sunday until 8:00 PM.
After years of preparation and another year of involuntary postponement, the Kampa Museum was opened in September 2003. To date, nearly 100,000 people have visited its exhibitions and displays, said Klára Adamcová from the museum to ČTK.
The main attraction of the Kampa Museum is the lifelong collection of Jan and Meda Mládek, which includes almost 1,200 works by Czech artists of the 20th century. Its highlight is a unique collection of 225 paintings and drawings by the pioneer of abstraction, František Kupka.
It also includes more than 200 paintings and sculptures by artists from Poland, Hungary, former Yugoslavia, and Russia, 50 oils by contemporary American, Belgian, and French painters, extensive documentation of art from Central Europe, and several thousand books on art. The collection was donated by Mládková to Prague, and the city, according to signed contracts, lent it to the Mládek Foundation and allows it to use the Sovovy Mlyny for 99 years. The estimated value of the collection is 380 million crowns.
The renovation of the dilapidated Sovovy Mlyny complex on the left bank of the Vltava River, which began in May 2000, was accompanied by a number of disputes. It started with the announcement of a public architectural competition for the reconstruction of the building in 1998. No winner emerged from it, and Mládková chose the proposal by Vienna architect Helena Bukovanská, which she liked from the beginning.
The case of glass artifacts, which the owner of the collection wanted to have on the building, was also publicized. Thanks to the decision of then-Minister of Culture Pavel Dostál in July 2001, a glass cube was placed on the stair tower, which was criticized by heritage conservationists, but which Mládková insisted on. The renovation of the mills cost over 120 million crowns, provided by both the city and the foundation.
During the flood in 2002, water flooded the Kampa Museum up to three meters high, but the exhibits were unaffected. The Sovovy Mlyny complex was not protected by flood barriers but was insured. Most of the damage, amounting to approximately 20 million crowns, was to the technological equipment. This March, when Prague also experienced a significant flood, barriers were set up on Kampa as a precaution, and the former mills building was also prepared. However, the flood ultimately was not nearly as severe as four years ago.

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