Museo Moderno (Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art)

About this place

The Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, known as the Moderno, was founded by the art critic Rafael Squirru in 1956. In its first years it had no building at all, so the press nicknamed it the «ghost museum», and its first show sailed on a ship that called at twenty cities around the world with works by more than fifty Argentine artists. Since 1989 it has occupied a 1918 industrial building in San Telmo, once a tobacco company's warehouse, with a red-brick facade; it was enlarged and renewed in 2018. Its collection holds about eleven thousand works of modern and contemporary Argentine art, from paintings and sculpture to photography and design, by artists such as Antonio Berni, Raquel Forner and Luis Felipe Noé. Selections are shown alongside changing temporary exhibitions in broad white galleries, with a bookshop and café looking out over the neighbourhood. It closes on Tuesdays, and entry is free on Wednesdays and the last Sunday of each month.