The best art galleries in Amsterdam (2024)

This excellent photography museum, located in a renovated canal house, holds regular exhibitions that rotate every couple of months and showcase emerging talent alongside established shutter-button maestros. They also organise talks and events for the photographically obsessed and publish their own magazine.

It says museum, but Moco stands for ‘modern contemporary’, and boasts almost exclusively art and sculpture in a very Instagrammable setting. Housed in an early 20th-century mansion, Moco’s permanent collection includes works by Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Keith Haring and Os Gemeos. Recent exhibitions have included works by Daniel Arsham and Icy and Sot, along with an ‘unauthorised’ exhibition of Banksy works from private collections. Don’t miss the impressive array of contemporary sculptures in the Moco Garden.

The Stedelijk Museum, with its incredible bath-shaped extension, is Amsterdam’s go-to institution for modern and contemporary art, with an extraordinary collection that includes works by Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Yves Klein, Roy Lichtenstein, Jeff Koons, Yayoi Kusama and Sheila Hicks. Presenting art and design objects side by side, the museum’s permanent collection is split into sections corresponding to key social movements and themes.

Artists such as Karel Appel, Eugène Brands and Corneille were once regarded as little more than eccentric troublemakers. Who’d have thought they’d become very much part of the canon? This museum provides a stylish environment to trace the development of one of the most influential art movements of the 20th century. The museum also hosts temporary exhibitions of work from outside the CoBrA group (recent hits have included shows on Frida Kahlo and Sigmar Polke).

Rembrandt bought this house in 1639 for ƒ13,000 (around €6,000) – a massive sum at the time. Indeed, the pressure of the mortgage payments eventually got to the profligate artist, who went bankrupt in 1656 and was forced to move. When he was declared bankrupt, clerks inventoried the house, and the records provided the renovators with clues as to what the house looked like. You can’t help but admire the skill and effort with which craftsmen have tried to re-create it, alongside the array of beautiful antiquities, objets d’art (Rembrandt was a compulsive collector) and 17th-century furnishings that fill the rooms.

This is the most important centre for film and cinematography in the Netherlands. The permanent collection includes films, movie posters and projection equipment. There are also 95,000 photos taken on the sets of films like ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’. The striking institute building dominates the northern waterfront and is worth the free ferry ride alone.

You can almost smell the Big Apple in Reflex. The New York flavour extends to its international names, like Araki and Christo, as well as celebrity locals such as Dadara and Erin Olaf. This is where to come for that inflatable Scream doll. They also have a exhibition space across the street.

Opened in 1683 as a home for the elderly, this quaint building beside the Amstel River is a satellite of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. The museum has no permanent collection, but twice a year, it hosts a new exhibition from the main Hermitage collection. There’s also a permanent exhibition of 17th-century Golden Age group portraits from the collections of the Amsterdam Museum and the Rijksmuseum, brought together in one impressive gallery, while the museum’s Outsider Art Museum showcases less conventional works. Tickets to each area can be purchased separately or as part of an all-in ticket.

Owner Oscar van den Voorn is an energetic sup-porter of art who manages to display a sense of humour. Visitors can expect stained-glass, graffiti, LSD-inspired art and sporadic themed dinners (check the website for details).