Kunstkring Art Gallery, Art gallery and restaurant in Central Jakarta, Indonesia.
Kunstkring Art Gallery is a two-story building in the Dutch colonial style located in Central Jakarta, with tall ceilings and large windows that face the Menteng neighborhood. The ground floor holds a restaurant serving Indonesian food, and the upper floor displays contemporary art alongside antique furnishings.
The building opened in 1914 as the headquarters of the Fine Arts Circle of the Dutch East Indies, designed by architect Pieter Moojen. It served as the Immigration Office from 1950 to 1997, after which a restoration brought it back to its original cultural use.
The building's name comes from the Bataviasche Kunstkring, the art circle founded in the Dutch East Indies that held its first exhibition of Dutch painters born in Indonesia. In the 1920s it was the hub for affiliated art circles in Bandung, Surabaya and other cities, and in 1936 it opened a museum showing international paintings loaned from European museums. Today a room is dedicated to Raden Saleh, a pioneer of Indonesian romantic painting.
The main entrance on the facade leads into the ground-floor restaurant; the gallery occupies the upper floor and is reached by the large staircase at the side of the building. The original decorative lamps are missing and the stained glass was looted in 1999, so some facade details differ from the 1914 design.
The building was the first in Indonesia to use reinforced concrete, a fact not visible from its colonial facade. Its stained glass was looted in 1999, and the original decorative lamps are also missing.
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