National Gallery Alexandros Soutzos Museum

The National Gallery was founded in 1900 by a law in which provision was also made for the assignment of a chief curator of the Foundation. In 1954, the National Gallery merged with the Alexandros Soutzos Estate, hence its double name.

The institutional role of the National Gallery is to collect, safe-keep, preserve, study and exhibit works of art towards the aesthetic training of the public, the on-going education through art and the recreation that it is able to provide, as well as the self-awareness of the Greek people through the history of art, which expresses the national history on a symbolic level.

Its early collections came from the National Technical University and the University of Athens. Today, the National Gallery collections comprise more than 20,000 works of painting, sculpture, engraving and other forms of art; this is the treasury of Modern Greek art, encompassing the period from the post-Byzantine times until today. Approximately 3,000 works have been added to the National Gallery collections in recent years. Moreover, the National Gallery owns a remarkable collection of Western European paintings. The National Gallery Alexandros Soutzos Museum also houses an extensive library with invaluable archival material and specialised conservation laboratories, equipped with up-to-date scanning, examination and restoration systems.