History of Magasin III

Magasin III opened to the public for the first time on January 31, 1988, in the eponymous harbor warehouse in the Stockholm Free Port, surrounded by ships and piers, shifting goods from near and far. The warehouse’s own load changed significantly from coffee and carpets to contemporary art since its inauguration in 1926. Works by American artists Lynda Benglis, John Chamberlain, Joel Fisher, Mel Kendrick and Robert Terrien arrived in Stockholm and came to stay. Few of them had been seen in the country or wider Nordic region ever before. They were subsequently joined by several hundred others. What happened during the 37 years following the initial landing can be summarized in its most rudimentary form as follows: 100 exhibitions, 135 productions, 1200 works in more than 18000 objects.

Magasin III was conceived by David Neuman and Robert Weil and is the result of an unsolicited journey. Magasin III was never meant to be another museum, even though that did not keep it from later on becoming its very own version of what a museum can be. Since its inception, it maintained its independence, solely funded and supported by Robert Weil through his business and then family foundation, allowing for an institution to first create, and then to hold over time its unique position within a changing cultural fabric surrounding it.

The awareness that nobody asked for it to be planned or built, neither political decision nor public demand having their claims on its existence and raison d’être, runs deep in the understanding of everyone working at, or with the place. The inherent knowledge of both privilege and responsibility stemming from the absence of any extrinsic vision outside the artistic expressions itself, informs the way things can, and frequently even have to be done here. Starting out, Magasin III was essentially a white walled one room viewing cube, to be entered through the building’s staff entrance, followed by a long corridor. The industrial ride on the heavy-duty goods lift wasn’t available to the visitor back then. Neither were the various and countlessly rebuilt viewing spaces, exhibition halls, or the second level and library that were added over the years.

To the Swedish art scene of the late 1980s and early 90s the concept of a seemingly purpose-free place, privately owned and run, yet open to the public and of visibly and strictly non-commercial nature, was virtually non-existent. Contemporary art was the domain of a handful of state-run institutions rooted in a national museum tradition with a defined and mostly educational remit. Against this backdrop it does not surprise that suspicion of a hidden agenda of undefined nature was rife from the go.

Magasin III did never have a commercial agenda. Far from wanting to play a role in the emerging market of contemporary art of mostly Anglo-American dominance already those days, Magasin III was raised on an intense sense of longing after the intimacy and radical simplicity American minimalism had established across a buoying small and mid-size private gallery scene. There, curiosity and openness to encounter new expressions was enough of a ticket for a spectator to be invited in for an equally intimate and intense artistic journey.

The absence of wall texts was one of the more immediately notable ones. In reclusiveness, the early Magasin III carries strong hints of dia arts foundation and the Earth Room in New York, in visual language the stripped back attitude of a warehouse scene that purposefully shies away from public institutions’ foyer culture.

The audacity of staging Magasin III’s first exhibitions – Five American Artists, Walter De Maria, Alfredo Jaar and Ronald Jones – amounts more than anything else to the willingness of letting the works speak for themselves, at the risk that the curious visitor’s gaze might stray, following its own will, fancy and disposition, instead of catching an intended or prescribed reading according to historical and political relevance, or other.


Despite profound and initially formative experiences, Magasin III loosened its American inflection early on. Having set up in Sweden in 1988, in a matter of speaking it arrived in Scandinavia with the opening of the exhibition by artist Leonard Forslund in 1990.

Magasin III started acquiring works as soon as it opened to the public. One can see the collection as a memory keeper of the museum’s history by way of exhibitions, allowing for new contexts to enter a continuum with what was done before. A strong interest in what an artist cares about right then and there often led to new productions, focused on a specific moment and situation. The production model at Magasin III was thereby a driving force, inviting artists to conceive new work in close cooperation with the institution, while sharing ideas and resources along the way. The productions become markers of their time when preserved in the collection, they bring together important aspects of artistic thinking and convey partial answers to eternal questions. The consequences and possibilities for the interplay between producing, exhibiting and collecting were thrown wide open from this point onwards.

The more Magasin III became a museum, the more it developed an appetite for additional platforms of experimentation.

Starting in 2002, Magasin III’s project Djurgårdsbrunn took place over four summers as an off-site for collaborations between local and international interdisciplinary artists. The mostly outdoor project space was located on a historic site with an existing summer pavilion and an inn near the Djurgårdsbrunn bridge in Stockholm. The idea of a permanent satellite space in a different cultural context led to the opening of Magasin III Jaffa in greater Tel Aviv in 2018. The exhibition space is located in a residential neighborhood that borders with Jaffa’s famous flea market. The unique architecture enables passersby to view the exhibitions also from the outside, day and night. Magasin III Jaffa’s diverse program features both local and international contemporary artists. In 2022, Israel’s first bookstore dedicated to artists’ books from the region, Magasin III Jaffa Books, was established. The bookstore is located across from the exhibition space and also features artworks by local artists in the vitrine.

Magasin III has a long-standing commitment to education with a special emphasis on the role of the curator. Magasin III was one of the driving forces behind establishing the International Master’s Program Curating Art at Stockholm University in 2003, then one of the first curatorial study programs in Scandinavia.

As a further development of the collaboration with the Stockholm university, David Neuman together with art professor Margaretha Thompson initiated the idea of an art space at the university campus. Accelerator was inaugurated in the fall of 2019 and is an exhibition space for art, science and societal issues. Magasin III and The Robert Weil Family Foundation are the Founding Patrons of Accelerator.

In 2017 Magasin III handed over the entire exhibition space to itself, interrupting the stream of producing and exhibiting of artists and works in order to look at the institution it had become over the course of three decades. Magasin III’s history, like the one of everything else, was written in the now, in the constant little movements that resulted in works, in exhibitions, publications, encounters and experiences, in artists and visitors who came, stayed and returned.

Entering into Intermission and in thousands of documents, papers, photos, artifacts, letters and notes, the museum laid itself out, for once not to the public, but for its own eyes, and onto its own walls. Looking back created space for new ideas. In October 2020, the museum was finally able to welcome visitors back to a partially revisioned Magasin III.

The new visitor model meant that, in addition to current exhibitions, the audience had the possibility to get an insight into the process of upcoming exhibitions, the creation of new works, and the caring for the collection. Personal encounters through scheduled visits and in-depth exploration were guiding principles. At the time the COVID-19 pandemic was raging and caused severe social disruption, affecting culture institutions worldwide and so also Magasin III. The museum had to close and reopen several times. Core ideas behind the new model became closely associated with the pandemic instead of looked at for the actual reasons behind them. During the course of three years the institution had been exploring alternative ways to engage with visitors and to support the artists in a cultural landscape that had changed dramatically since the inception of the institution. As the world moved on after the crisis, Magasin III found a path in the middle: a museum sharing its time between regular opening hours for the general public and in-depth access for students.

At Magasin III, almost four decades of independence, above the freedom from basic constraints, consisted in the freedom to be curious, leading experimentation and exploration into the largest array of visual culture. Freedom in an artistic domain means more than anything else permission to take risks, which in turn entails the possibility for failure.

Resources came in terms of funding, and in terms of values and convictions. The humanistic belief system at the heart of the Robert Weil Family Foundation is derived from the family’s personal, as well as the collective experience, memory and lessons learned from the 20th century’s darkest episode: the complete erosion of all values of culture and humanity during the Second World War. While the family’s newfound home in Sweden – in many ways – could feel remote from the more immediate European post-war experience, taking a comprehensive and international perspective was a fundamental part of the conversation. Here, the conviction was formed: an open and democratic society fundamentally depends on the cohesion between culture and education, politics, and the economy. Defending and nurturing a democratic society based on these values provides the basis of the foundation’s work until the present day. At the same time, and importantly when it comes to time and context of founding Magasin III, the progressive belief that humanity had taken a turn to the better, that it was thought to be on course to eradicate evil in its most brutish form. Parts of such cause for optimism were based on the interplay between the recognition of fundamental human rights, democratic values, and importantly, artistic and cultural reflection upon these.