Museu de Arte Contemporânea—MAC/CCB

MAC/CCB – Museum of Contemporary Art and Architecture Centre, Lisbon. A Living, Habitable, and Inhabited Space

MAC/CCB is a space where a community is built around art and architecture, comprising people, relationships, objects, territories, and affections. It is a museum of experimentation and innovation where visitors can connect with artists and architects, explore their ideas, and reflect on the past and present to envision what might shape the future. As an active agent engaging diverse audiences through a dynamic programme of exhibitions, activities, initiatives, and critical thought, MAC/CCB seeks to create a welcoming, caring environment. Living, habitable, and inhabited: this is how MAC/CCB aims to define itself.

A must see in Lisbon, the MAC/CCB – Museum of Contemporary Art and Architecture Centre is the most international museum of contemporary art in Portugal. It houses the State Contemporary Art Collection of Portugal (CACE), the Teixeira de Freitas Collection, the Holma/Ellipse Collection and the Berardo Collection. Here, visitors may enjoy works by both contemporary and twentieth-century artists, from a range of cultural backgrounds, who work in different media and have contributed to the history of art.

The museum gives an insight of the main paths of artistic practices, either in the permanent exhibition of the Berardo Collection or through temporary exhibitions. Names such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Vieira da Silva, Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Bruce Nauman, Lourdes Castro, Helena Almeida and Cindy Sherman, among others, are presented in context with the art movements that they helped define. 

The MAC/CCB, which includes the Architecture Centre, reinforces the mission of the Centro Cultural de Belém, enhancing the dialogue between the visual arts, architecture, and the performing arts through the presentation of temporary exhibitions by contemporary artists. The Architecture Centre reopened in April 2025 with an architectural project by the Swiss-Portuguese studio BUREAU. This project reimagines the garage as a flexible space, accommodating exhibitions, workspaces, public events, and communal gatherings. The Centre’s inaugural programming cycle focus on the theme Interspecies.

Opened on October 27, 2023, the MAC/CCB can be visited from Tuesday to Sunday, between 10am and 6:30pm.