Almaty Museum of Arts Opens, Central Asia’s First Private Museum of Modern Art
Opened on 12 September 2025 beneath the Tian Shan, the 10,000 sq m museum by Chapman Taylor shows the collection of businessman Nurlan Smagulov: more than 700 works from Kazakhstan, Central Asia and beyond.
The Almaty Museum of Arts opened to the public on 12 September 2025 in Kazakhstan’s largest city. It is the first private museum of modern and contemporary art in Central Asia, and the first museum of its kind in the country.
The collection
The museum was founded and paid for by Nurlan Smagulov, a Kazakh businessman who has collected art for more than thirty years. He has given the collection, more than 700 works, to the museum. Its centre is the art of Kazakhstan and Central Asia from the twentieth century to the present, including painters such as Aisha Galimbayeva and the conceptual artist Rustam Khalfin. Around them are works by international artists, among them Richard Serra and Yinka Shonibare. The artistic director is Meruyert Kaliyeva, founder of Aspan Gallery in Almaty.
The museum opened with two exhibitions. Qonaqtar, a word meaning guests, drew on the collection and took hospitality as its subject. The second was a retrospective of the Kazakh artist Almagul Menlibayeva, titled I Understand Everything.
The building
The British practice Chapman Taylor designed the building, which has about 10,060 square metres of floor space and took three years to build. It stands at the corner of Al-Farabi and Nazarbayev avenues, on the southern edge of the city, where the ground begins to rise towards the Tian Shan. Two L-shaped volumes interlock, one clad in pale Jura limestone and the other in aluminium. The architects describe them as the mountain and the city. Between them runs a tall atrium lit from above, called the Art Street, from which the galleries are reached. There are also rooms devoted to single artists, a restaurant, a shop and terraces. A ballet theatre is being built next door.
For travellers
Almaty is the usual point of arrival for journeys in Kazakhstan and to the mountains and lakes along the Kyrgyz border. Until now its museums were those of the Soviet period. The new museum, together with other private art spaces that opened in the city in 2025, gives visitors a reason to spend a day or two in town before heading for the hills. It follows a pattern seen elsewhere in Asia, where a private collection has given a city its first museum of contemporary art, as Museum MACAN did in Jakarta in 2017.