Just off Old Town Square, past the cafes and the crowds waiting for the Astronomical Clock, sits a museum that started almost by accident. Today, IAM Illusion Art Museum Prague pulls in over 200,000 visitors a year and has held TripAdvisor’s Travelers’ Choice Award for five straight years. Their journey in getting there has been unconventional.
From Shopping Malls to Old Town Square The museum wasn’t originally supposed to be a museum. Co-founder Jakub Bechyně and his partner Patrik Proško had been running a traveling illusion exhibit that moved between shopping malls, renting space for a month at a time before packing up and relocating. It worked, but it wasn’t permanent.
Then, in 2017, the owner of a building on Old Town Square approached them with an idea: turn part of it into a museum. Rather than build something from scratch, the team pulled from what they already had on the shelf, opening with one floor and sixteen exhibits in 2018. The collection has grown to more than 60 pieces since.
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Illusion Art Museum Prague (@iamprague) The museum moved to its current location in 2022 after the original building was sold. The new space, ideally located between Old Town Square and Wenceslas Square, needed walls removed and floors rebuilt to accommodate the art. The costs were substantial, but it turned out to be a good problem to have as the location dramatically increased the exhibition’s visibility to passersby on one of Prague’s busiest tourist thoroughfares.
Choosing Technique Over Fame IAM Prague doesn’t chase famous names. The team looks for a specific kind of illusion craft, one with real artistic quality, a genuine optical trick, and ideally a story behind it worth telling. That approach led them to reverse-perspective specialist Patrick Hughes, and to artists whose work they discovered secondhand and eventually acquired outright rather than simply displaying on loan.
In several cases, the museum ended up owning the pieces after renting them for years and deciding they belonged permanently in the collection. About 80 percent of the exhibition has changed since opening. Early pieces built quickly to fill the space have gradually been replaced as the museum brought in stronger, more polished work from local and international arti…
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