The Spiš Artists’ Gallery belongs among the youngest collecting institutions in the region but also in Slovakia, and adequately it also has the youngest art collection, although its basis were laid before the birth of the gallery itself on the ground of the then Homeland Museum, today Spiš Museum in Spišská Nová Ves. The basis of the art collection comprised about five hundred works of art from older collections of the museum, but mainly from the activities for the upcoming gallery, just a short time before its birth. Already this basic collection contained the works mainly of contemporary artists, who are connected with the Spiš region by their origin, or they live and create in Spiš, possibly they worked in this region for a long time. 

 

The historical building in the centre of the city Spišská Nová Ves in Zimná Street 46, reconstructed in 1979 – 1986, became the seat of the gallery. The history of the building, originally a town house, goes back to the second half of the 16th century. 
Interesting Renaissance architecture with three-dimensional division with cross and barrel vaults with well-preserved details of arcades, columns, cornices and beams forms an attractive environment for a visitor, filled with art that gives the opportunity of cognition, education, discovering, gaining new experiences and meetings. 

 

The art collection has grown more than three times the amount during the twenty years of the gallery functioning, today it comprises 1898 pieces of artistic artefacts from the area of painting, graphics, illustration, photography and sculpture. 

 

The works of art from the art collection are presented on three permanent expositions. Since 2002 the exposition of the art of sculpture in the Garden of Art, since 2012 the second permanent exposition – Terra Gothica / Gothic route, since 2013 re-installation permanent exposition of Jozef Hanula’s drawings and paintings.

Besides collecting, scientific and research and culture-educational activities of the gallery, the attendance activities are an important part of its functioning. The exposition activity of the gallery maps and presents mainly the artists with relations to the region, but it touches also Slovak visual art and in not a small amount it presents the work of foreign artists. Besides a lot of Slovak authors’ expositions, the works of the artists from Poland, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Serbia, France, Bulgaria, Great Britain, Austria, Germany, Ukraine, Hungary, Canada, Israel, The Czech Republic, Ireland and other countries of the world filled the exposition areas of the gallery. 

 

About twenty-five domestic, but also foreign, expositions a year take a turn in the exposition areas of the gallery. 

 

Nowadays, the gallery has well-developed culture-educational activities aimed at the communication with a visitor. Their aim is to address and attract different target groups from the children of preschool age through the students of various types of schools and young people within educative and different interactive projects.

In the last yeas of the gallery acting its orientation has come out from the reflection of the dynamic changes of the social and cultural conditions in Slovakia and in Europe, which consequence is a constant broadening of its field of activity and cooperation from the regional environment to the whole European area. The main activities of the gallery are concentrated on the cooperation and support of common projects with foreign partners and on the propagation of our visual art abroad.

Since 2015 we are part of an international project Google Art Project that aims is through the development of the latest technologies to mediate artworks Internet users around the world.