Klösz Villa to be renovated, National Museum of Photography to be located near the City Park

Next to the City Park, the collection of the Hungarian Museum of Photography, comprising some 700,000 works, will find a new home in a building converted from the former villa and photographic studio of György Klösz, one of the leading figures in Hungarian photography. Currently operating as a foundation, but soon to become a new member institution of the Museum of Fine Arts and a national public collection, the museum will open its doors to visitors in 2025 as the National Museum of Photography after the renovation of the building , according to a statement sent to our newspaper.

Will open in 2025

The former Klösz villa, located at 49 Városliget fasor, was recently purchased by Városliget Zrt..The building, which has been converted into a 3,000 square metre building, will become a worthy home for the unique collection of Hungarian photography, becoming part of the cultural institutions of the City Park, which have been renewed or newly created within the Liget Budapest Project.  

Opening in 2025 as a public collection, it will

• over a thousand square metres of exhibition space
• a specialist library,
• museum educational activities
• and a lecture theatre for a professional event.

The artefacts in the museum's collection are housed in the museum building, which was constructed as part of the Liget Budapest project, handed over in 2019, renovated by Strabag, National Museum Restoration and Storage Centre (OMRRK).

More than six decades of searching for a worthy home for the collection

Over the past almost a century and a half, many ideas have been floated for the location of a photography museum in the capital, but efforts to date have failed. In 1957, the then newly formed Association of Hungarian Photographers made an attempt to have the already significant collection housed in the collection of the Hungarian National Gallery, but the response was a firm refusal, saying that "photography does not belong to the fine arts". After decades of turmoil, the museum was housed in the early 1990s in the former Orthodox synagogue in Kecskemét, where it was run by a foundation, in conditions and under conditions unparalleled by the importance of Hungarian photography, on less than 300 square metres until now.