Mu.ZEE

Mu.ZEE exhibits, collects, manages, digitises and researches visual art from the 19th century to the present day. The museum links its unique collection of exclusive Belgian art to the international art scene and reveals the links between modern and contemporary art.

Mu.ZEE is housed in a building with a rich history. Until 1981 it was part of SEO, Spaarzaamheid Economie Oostende, which was founded in 1892. This cooperative became a success story in the Ostend distribution sector, and branches were soon established in Ostend and along the coast. In the late 1940s, in search of a new head office with a department store for the SEO, it was decided to extend an existing SEO building on the Amsterdamstraat, which housed a pharmacy and a beer bottling plant. The first extension was on the Gentstraat side, but the icing on the cake was the new main store with a thirty-metre curved glass wall on Romestraat: shoes, medicines, clothes, food - you name it, it was there.

In 1981 the cooperative went bankrupt, but five years later, in 1986, the doors reopened as the Provincial Museum of Modern Art (also known as the PMMK). At the end of 2009, a new museum was opened under the name Mu.ZEE.

Want to visit the museum? Check out their website.