Aargauer Kunsthaus

The Aargauer Kunsthaus is home to one of the most beautiful and comprehensive public collections of recent Swiss art. It is an ideal venue for encountering the great diversity of Swiss art – from the 18th century to today.

The initiative was taken to build up an art collection in Aarau with the foundation of the Aargauische Kunstverein in 1860. From the very beginning, Swiss art was the main focus of the collecting activities. Regular new acquisitions, donations and works on permanent loan continue to broaden the scope of the collection to this very day.

The Aargauer Kunsthaus, originally built in 1959, became increasingly unable to cope with the constant expansion of the collection and the dynamism of the exhibition programme. After several years of planning, therefore, a unique extension designed by the internationally renowned architects Herzog & de Meuron and the artist Rémy Zaugg was opened in 2003.

The building represents a harmonious blend of old and new, a mixture of park and city, resulting from a careful analysis of the urban surroundings. While the entrance area and foyer, with the two winding staircases, make a spectacular, open and inviting impact, the architecture of the exhibition rooms recedes into the background, so to speak. The Aargauer Kunsthaus has a total of 3’000 square metres of exhibition space (twice as much as before the extension) at its disposal in bright spacious rooms. Parallel to the permanent exhibition of the collection, about six alternating exhibitions are mounted here each year. The building also houses a museum café, an artbook shop, a publicly accessible reference library and a workshop for the museum education programme.