Praha approved the amendment to the zoning plan for the repository of the National Gallery

Prague - Prague has changed its zoning plan to allow for the planned construction of a new National Gallery Prague (NGP) depository in Jinonice. The change was approved today by city councilors. The complex will be created according to the design by the studio JIKA-CZ, which was selected by NGP in an architectural competition. The investor will be the state. According to earlier information, the complex will offer not only space for the care of artworks but also a publicly accessible part - an open depository and public educational programs.

"Changes to the zoning plan in Prague often took up to ten years. That is now in the past. We have managed to significantly speed up the changes, and the one for the National Gallery was record short," said the mayor's deputy Petr Hlaváček (for TOP 09).

According to the gallery, the existing depositories are already completely full and do not allow for the proper storage of additional collection items. The complex will include restoration studios, laboratories, and a digitization center. Selected artworks will also be placed outdoors, in a publicly accessible sculpture park. Costs were expected to be around 1.3 billion crowns according to last year's information from NGP, but with rising material and construction prices, an increase can be anticipated.

NGP has six buildings in the capital with permanent exhibitions or displays, and it also organizes exhibitions in the Valdštejn Riding School, which belongs to the Senate. The gallery manages the largest collection of visual art in the Czech Republic. It is an institution with more than a two-hundred-year tradition that collects, records, studies, exhibits, publishes, and mediates artworks from all visual arts fields from antiquity to the present.