Cyprus is better known for its ancient sites than for contemporary art, but the island has a modern art scene worth seeking out if you know where to look. Most of it is in Nicosia, where three public venues stand within walking distance of each other, and on the coast at Ayia Napa an open-air sculpture park holds well over a hundred works.
The Ayia Napa Sculpture Park covers a 20,000 square metre slope at the eastern edge of the town, where Kryou Nerou Avenue meets the road to Cape Greco, with views over the sea. The Municipality of Ayia Napa inaugurated it on 10 May 2014, at the end of its first sculpture symposium, when fourteen sculptors from Cyprus and Greece made their pieces on site. The symposium has since become international and has added new works almost every year: by 2018 the park held 186 sculptures by 150 artists, and the first phase of the 9th International Sculpture Symposium in 2023 added thirteen more by sculptors from abroad.
Entry is free and the park is open all day. It runs straight into the Park of Mediterranean Plants, Cacti and Succulents, laid out as an extension of the sculpture park, so it is worth allowing time for both.
In Nicosia, start with NiMAC, the Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, associated with the Pierides Foundation. It occupies the Old Powerhouse, the city's former power station inside the Venetian walls, converted under an agreement between the Electricity Authority of Cyprus and Nicosia Municipality. It opened on 14 January 1994, its restoration won a Europa Nostra award the same year, and it has since staged more than eighty exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, many of them with museums and art centres abroad.
NiMAC works through temporary exhibitions, and installations often feature: this summer's A slight indisposition (26 June to 26 July 2026) brought together sixteen artists from Cyprus and abroad with audiovisual works, installations, performances, photographs, paintings and drawings. The centre opens only while an exhibition is on, Wednesday to Saturday 10:00 to 20:00 and Sunday 10:00 to 18:00, at 19 Palias Ilektrikis Street, so check nimac.org.cy or ring +357 22 797400 before you go.
The State Gallery of Contemporary Art, run by the Deputy Ministry of Culture, is split between two buildings. The Majestic, on Stasinou Avenue just outside the walls, is a listed building of 1926 that began as a house, later served as a clinic and then became a hotel called the Majestic. The state expropriated it in 1983 for cultural use, and since 1990 it has shown a permanent exhibition of key works from the State Collection, spanning the late 19th century to the early 21st; the collection as a whole numbers about 4,000 works. Entry is free, and it opens Monday to Friday 10:00 to 17:00 and Saturday 10:00 to 13:00, closed on public holidays (+357 22 458228).
The second building, SPEL, stands inside the walls on Ammochostou Street by the Famagusta Gate, a few hundred metres from NiMAC. The four-storey modernist block of 1965, designed by the architect Stavros Economou, originally housed the Nicosia Cooperative Credit Company, whose Greek initials give it its name. Renovated as a gallery, it opened in January 2019 with a major survey of the Cypriot artist Christoforos Savva (1924 to 1968), and it now presents a yearly programme of exhibitions on modern and contemporary art, architecture and design. Its 2026 exhibition, Agropoetics: Soils/Bodies (30 January to 30 June), brought more than fifty Cypriot artists together as part of the cultural programme of Cyprus's EU Council presidency.
Exhibitions there now appear under the name Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, as the Deputy Ministry works towards a Cyprus Museum of Contemporary Art, into which the existing gallery buildings are expected to pass. Entry to SPEL is free, but the official listings give different opening hours, so check the Department of Contemporary Culture's page on gov.cy or ring +357 22 479600 before you go.
The three Nicosia venues fit comfortably into one walk, but plan the day: the Majestic closes at 13:00 on Saturdays and all day on Sundays, NiMAC is shut on Mondays and Tuesdays, and SPEL is closed on Mondays. Wednesday to Friday, when all three are normally open, is the easiest time to see them together.
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