The Archive of Fine Arts

The Fine Art Archive arose in 1984 as a part of the activities of Gallery H in Kostelec nad Černými Lesy.  It has turned into a significant institution of the Czech fine art territory in the past years. It has become indispensable for researchers, students, institutions and wide public. The main Archive’s activity is to collect and process documents that are associated with contemporary Czech fine art, namely exhibition catalogues, art monographies, invitations, books, texts, magazines, photographs, transparencies, etc.
The Archive has collected hundreds of thousands of documents until today, occupying more than 2,000 metres of shelves. It represents the largest collection of documents with this specialisation in the Czech Republic. Besides the inventory we also run a library that is focused on fine art. The library functions also as a documentation and research centre.
We process the documents that are deposited in the archive so that they can be incorporated into our extensive database abART (www.isabart.org) with the online full open access content and monthly incoming traffic of over 25,000 visitors. AbART was created to record as precisely as possible, to classify and process in-depth all documents deposited in the Archive. Currently, there have been filed about 142,000 persons, processed 163,000 documents, 63,000 exhibitions and other events and created around 2,100,000 connections between them. As part of our activities we publish our own books and organize exhibitions, both connected mainly to the topics of our Archive, besides that we collaborate with various institutions and publishers on bigger research and publication projects.
The whole Archive, including the research centre, library and the information system abART is a long-term project that we have been running for many years. The Fine Art Archive is supported by the Ministry of Culture, the Prague Municipality and The State Cultural Fund of the Czech Republic.
www.artarchiv.cz, www.isabart.org, www.facebook.com/Artarchiv