Museum of Cycladic Art

The Museum of Cycladic Art is a living cultural institution in the centre of Athens that focuses on the promotion of the ancient civilizations of the Aegean and Cyprus, with special emphasis on Cycladic art of the 3rd millennium BC. It is a Legal Entity under Private Law supervised by the Ministry of Culture withοut state funding.

The Museum has operated since 1986 to house and display the private collection of antiquities of Dolly and Nikolaos Goulandris. Since then, it has expanded significantly and today holds one of the most comprehensive private collections of Cycladic art in the world, with representative specimens of the world-famous Cycladic marble figurines.

The nucleus of the Museum’s Cycladic Art Collection is the marble figurines depicting naked human figures that fascinate the visitor with their simplicity and abstractness, elements that have inspired some of the 20th-century’s greatest artists, such as Konstantin Brancusi, Amedeo Modigliani, Alberto Giacometti, Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moore.

The Museum’s permanent collections include 3000 Cycladic, ancient Greek, and ancient Cypriot artefacts, testimonies to the civilizations that flourished in the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean from the 4th millennium BC to approximately the 6th century AD.

The Museum’s temporary exhibitions focus on both archaeology and modern and contemporary art, and aim to connect the public not only to antiquity but also to important 20th and 21st-century artists, by exploring the links between ancient civilizations and contemporary artistic creation. So far, it has hosted works by and exhibitions on Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Thomas Struth, Louise Bourgeois, Sarah Lucas, Ugo Rondinone, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Ai Weiwei, Cy Twombly, and George Condo, among others.