See the New Frank Gehry Building Rising From the Shore of the Persian Gulf in Abu Dhabi to House a Global Art Collection

Officials just announced a December opening for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the long-awaited fourth installment in the Guggenheim Foundation’s lineup of art museums

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

July 29, 2026 2:20 p.m.

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Abu Dhabi is about to get its own Guggenheim—designed by none other than the late architect Frank Gehry. It’s been two decades since the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation announced plans to build a museum in the United Arab Emirates capital. Now, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi finally has an opening date: December 11, 2026.

Like other Guggenheim museums—which are located in New York, Bilbao and Venice—Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will focus on modern and contemporary art. Curators have been developing its collection since 2009, according to a statement. Among the featured artists will be stars like Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

“But right next to them, you’ll have amazing contemporary artists that maybe, unfortunately, the vast public don’t know much about—artists from Southeast Asia, artists from Asia, artists from North Africa, Central Africa and the Arab world,” Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak, chairman of Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism, tells the National’s William Mullally. “The collection itself is truly global.”

Guggenheim Abu Dhabi’s construction is nearly finished in the Persian Gulf city’s cultural district. Workers are bringing to life a characteristically funky design by Gehry: a “dynamic, layered exterior composed of nine metallic cones,” per Artnet’s Jo Lawson-Tancred. It’ll be the Canadian-American architect’s second Guggenheim: His design of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, built in the 1990s, cemented Gehry’s place in architecture’s upper echelon.

“The architects I graduated with were more engineering-centric; I felt more comfortable with painters and sculptors,” Gehry, who died last year, told TIME in 2023. “I was looking for a way to express the times we lived in. … Our time is full of movement and change, and this building was the first curvy use of those ideas.”

The new museum won’t be Gehry’s only contribution to Abu Dhabi, either. One of the last designs he created was for the metallic, rippling Dar al Funoon Abu Dhabi, a new performing arts center that recently broke ground. It and the forthcoming Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will fit right into Gehry’s oeuvre: a “parade of buildings that cranked and slumped as if hit by a wrecking ball, or crashed and whirled like dervishes, defying laws of gravity and structural logic,” the Guardian’s Catherine Slessor wrote last year.

Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, costing more than $1 billion to construct, will contain some 30 indoor galleries plus outdoor exhibition space. According to the museum, the roof of the building will boast ten sculptural cones—nine of stainless steel and one of onyx and glass—that will provide ventilation and shade in the desert landscape.

In 2021, there were already 600 artworks in Guggenheim Abu Dhabi’s collection, which Abu Dhabi’s government owns. The collection is “uniquely local and global,” says Guggenheim Foundation director and CEO Mariët Westermann in the statement.

“Our ambition is to show a new art history,” Westermann tells the New York Times’ Zachary Small. “This museum was built to invite visitors from the country, the region and the world.”

Sonja Anderson | Read More

Sonja Anderson is a daily correspondent for Smithsonian magazine who covers art, archaeology and culture, from newly discovered artifacts to the latest art heists.