All National Gallery buildings remain closed on Sundays due to a dispute with the security agency. They will open again on Tuesday, and are traditionally closed on Mondays, said Miroslav Krupička, head of the PR and marketing department. The agency terminated the contract on Friday. She claims that the gallery has not paid her for services since November.

According to the register, the gallery has a contract concluded with the security agency ABAS IPS Management since the end of September. should last until March 2020. “The National Gallery in Prague has not paid to date for the services originally provided since November last year. For November and December invoices alone, the amount owed is more than six million crowns. We are surprised that this is how the state-established company behaves.” the media representative of the agency Eva Kijonková said on Saturday. According to her, the agency offered the gallery of basic security protection of all buildings for the necessary time.

However, the National Gallery does not want to renew the contract with the agency. According to its director Jiří Fajt, the closure of the buildings was a serious repeated breach of duty by the agencies. “They did not fulfill their obligations, they did not build entire shifts and for that reason we could not open our facilities in the past. This was the subject of a dispute. I consider it completely frivolous,” he told Czech Television.

The gallery informs about the situation on the doors of individual buildings and also on its website. The validity of purchased tickets is extended until the end of May.

Former NG director Milan Knížák considers the closure of all gallery buildings to be an unprecedented event. “This is further proof of the absolute incompetence and incompetence of Jiří Fajta and Minister Daniel Herman, who holds him in the director’s position and refuses to respect critical voices,” Knížák said. According to him, Fajt should be revoked immediately and Herman should resign. “The protection and presentation of the collections is the primary task of the National Gallery,” Knížák added.

The gallery manages six historic buildings and manages 400,000 works of art worth hundreds of billions of crowns. Last year, a total of 712,690 people came to her exhibition and permanent exhibition.