The purpose of the museum is to promote modern Greek culture through products of contemporary art, to cultivate the aesthetic and critical faculties of the local people by mounting solo and group exhibitions of visual art, and to provide schoolchildren with artistic education.
The museum’s collection currently numbers 480 works by 254 artists. It is a representative collection of paintings, sculptures, and engravings by noted artists of the twentieth century. More specifically, it includes: paintings by Rengos, Plakotaris, Mavridis, Kaniaris, Tetsis, Kokkinidis, Mytaras, Kondos, Kanakakis, Kondoyannis, Tsaras, Xanthopoulos, Botsoglou, Dimitreas, Sahinis, Fokas, Golfinos, Lahas, Kalamaras, Papayannis, Yeoryadis, Zongolopoulos, Perandinos, Koulandianos, Lappas; sculptures by Halepas; engravings by Hadzikyriakos-Gikas, Rengos, Papayeoryiou, Grammatikopoulos, Papadakis, Xenakis, Nikolaou, Sikeliotis, Tsoklis, Moralis, Yannadakis, Nedelkos. A recent addition to the exhibits is a collection titled ‘Tribute to El Greco’, which was put together from donations from Greek artists to acquire El Greco’s ‘St Peter’ from the National Gallery and 44 engravings by 31 foreign artists from Florence. The collection was displayed in the museum in August 1999.
The museum has a library dedicated to the visual arts, an information archive, and an atelier for young people. It frequently organises art symposia and exhibitions of visual and applied art both on its own premises and elsewhere in Greece.
