'I will change everything': The assured ambition of new NGA director Nick Mitzevich

"The greatest things in Australian cultural life have happened when people have been confident about their point of view," says Mitzevich.Credit: Bill Henson

Nick Mitzevich is ebullient, if exhausted. It's late April and less than 24 hours remain of his riotously successful eight-year reign at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA). He's just whipped the 250 people gathered to farewell him in the AGSA courtyard into a final frenzy. "You loved me, I could feel it at a hundred paces," he enthused to the crowd of local burghers, donors and artists. "Thank you, for just letting me run."

Uber-dealers Roslyn Oxley and Anna Schwartz have flown in for the occasion, as have art stars Ben Quilty and Del Kathryn Barton. Campaign tales have been traded. There's the donor who contributed so heavily to the AGSA's contemporary art purchases that her reaction to news of Mitzevich's departure was, "Thank God! I can finally get a new car." And the Adelaide husbands who forbade Mitzevich from talking to their wives, given the thousands and, in some cases, millions of dollars in donations such conversations could cost them. Then there was his first meeting with the Chanel-clad Adelaide grande dame, Diana Ramsay. "Blue jeans and a crew cut," Ramsay said, looking the new boy up and down. "This is going to be fun."

A couple of days prior, the "sold" sticker went up on the 1.2-hectare property in the Adelaide Hills that Mitzevich, 48, has shared with his partner of 18 years, Rob. Tomorrow night the gallery's staff, all wearing Mitzevich masks, will fill the courtyard for one last hurrah. Then the couple will get in the car and head for their beach house on the NSW north coast, where Mitzevich will spend the next two months in rugby shorts, swimming and gardening, only emerging from his coastal chrysalis at the start of July to take up a job he was in many ways born for, as director of the National Gallery of Australia (NGA).

But all that is still in the future as he moves from the courtyard farewell to his own private after-party at a favourite restaurant, Osteria Oggi, a few blocks away. For tonight, Nick Mitzevich is suspended between eras and incarnations; behind him a job he's universally seen as having nailed; before him one the downsides and challenges of which aren't yet urgent.

There's no doubt they will become so. Mitzevich takes the reins at a crucial time in the NGA's evolution, as only the sixth director in its 36-year history. The vision and flair of the first, James Mollison, formed the early collection, securing a rash of modern Australian masters – from Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly series to thousands of works by Arthur Boyd and Albert Tucker – along with Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles, a coming-of-age controversy that defined Whitlam-era Australia. His successor, Betty Churcher, was the great populariser, using international blockbuster shows, from Rembrandt to the great surrealists, to turn Canberra into an unlikely tourist destination.

In the years since, though, the gallery has often seemed more lightning rod than lighthouse. Irishman Brian Kennedy's tumultuous tenure from 1997 to 2004 hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons, including cancelling a show deemed too risqué for the NGA's political masters, and concerns the gallery's airconditioning system was affecting staff health. The 10-year reign of his successor, Ron Radford, included a $100 million-plus new wing, but was marred by the Asian antiquities scandal that followed his 2008 purchase of the looted dancing Shiva statue.

So poisoned had the chalice become that long-time National Gallery of Victoria director Gerard Vaughan was brought back from academia in 2014 because no one whom the NGA considered appointable had applied after Radford's departure. "Gerard was there on a three-year term because he's a respected person of great experience in the field," says one insider. "But he was minding the shop until the new proprietor took over."

For many years we did dead artists so well. I just thought I might try the ones with a pulse.

As he sits over dinner at Osteria Oggi in late April, it's clear that new proprietor has begun to ready himself. Gone are the flowing locks he sported a fortnight earlier at the official announcement that he'd won the job, replaced by another crew cut. "I wanted to clean everything off and start again, because that's what I'm about to do," he says. "It's what I did when I came here eight years ago; you need to be ready and focused, cut everything back."

This most focused of individuals – who rarely touches alcohol, or stays out past 10pm – is, however, allowing himself to pause and savour this moment. Not only does he say yes to wine, he is seen to sip it. That he's still going strong as the evening wears on is down to the company he's chosen to savour it in.

To his right sits the man he calls his "brother from another mother", Ben Quilty, whose career Mitzevich kickstarted when, as director of the Newcastle Art Gallery, he built an entire show around one of Quilty's breakthrough Torana paintings. Opposite is another Mitzevich protégée, Del Kathryn Barton, who credits the director with inspiring her highly successful move into video art. To his left is his Adelaide friend, real-estate agent and plus-one, Candy Bennett, whom Mitzevich first encountered when she refused to lend him a video work by the hot Russian art collective AES+F during his time as director of the University of Queensland Art Museum.

Even in a town of soldered-on Mitzevich fans, this crew is hard core. "We came to Adelaide to show we back Nick," Quilty declares. "He's the new generation and the art world is run by old, straight, white men." Adds Barton: "For me, he defies categorisation. It's beyond race or generation or colour. Nick is a unicorn and Australia needs more unicorns."

As for Bennett, she has long since donated the AES+F work to the AGSA. "He was extremely energetic, extremely focused and extremely courageous, and so excited about what he was going to do," she recalls of Mitzevich's arrival in Adelaide. "And he has that slightly shy, naive demeanour. I immediately took to him, we all did."

Long-time arts administrator Michael Lynch, a former CEO of both the Sydney Opera House and London's Southbank Centre, has observed Mitzevich's rise with interest. "Adelaide is the most difficult town in Australia to be adopted in in less than 30 or 40 years. Nick's been there eight … but it's like he's been there his natural life."

Nick Mitzevich and Ben Quilty. "Nick is the new generation and the art world is run by old, straight, white men," says Quilty.Credit: Alex Makeyev

There's no question the AGSA was at a low ebb when Mitzevich arrived in 2010. His predecessor, Christopher Menz, had refused to renew his contract after five years, saying inadequate government funding was relegating the gallery to provincial status. The AGSA board knew it could afford neither a star nor the status quo, instead punting on the then 40-year-old Mitzevich, who had gone from running the Newcastle Art Gallery to the Queensland University Art Museum and was clearly looking to make his name. Three years earlier he had lost out by a hair's breadth on the Queensland Art Gallery directorship, which would make the career of that other current art-world star – and the man he is seen as most closely resembling – National Gallery of Victoria director Tony Ellwood.

Having backed him, even the board was surprised by the scale of Mitzevich's ambitions when he turned up, and the speed with which he began to realise them. AGSA visitation has almost doubled during Mitzevich's time there, from 420,000 and falling in 2010 to 800,000 and rising, with the average visitor age down from 55 to under 40. His knack with donors has almost quadrupled private giving, from $3.38 million in 2010 to almost $13 million in 2017, with more than $50 million raised overall, adding more than 4000 pieces to the near-$1 billion collection. Meanwhile, his way with politicians swelled the gallery's base budget by 43 per cent to $8.97 million and helped secure a Weatherill Labor Government commitment to a second gallery, Adelaide Contemporary, which, should the Marshall Liberal Government continue with it, would bring Adelaide into line with its dual-site peers in NSW, Victoria and Queensland.

The question now is whether Mitzevich can do the same for an institution seen to have lost whatever centrality it once had to the public imagination or visual arts agenda. A gallery in danger – paradoxically – of becoming provincial. The NGA is, after all, a much larger institution located in a town even smaller than Adelaide, the top echelons of which tend to fly out on a Friday evening and, sources say, are less interested than ever in the gallery. "A way has to be found to raise the NGA's profile with the politicians," says one insider. "They've neglected us; it's been very hard times."

Parallels with the pre-Mitzevich AGSA were underlined last month when, in an echo of Menz as he left the AGSA, outgoing NGA director Gerard Vaughan warned the gallery's mission was being undermined by federal government funding cuts, including the $3.94 million efficiency dividend in 2015 that led the NGA to shed 20 of its 237 staff. Cuts by successive governments had had "a profoundly negative impact ... on the running of the organisation, staff morale, brand perception and the ability to foster a culture of new ideas and innovation," Vaughan warned a parliamentary committee set up earlier this year to look into Canberra's national institutions. He noted that "the level of current government appropriation is $47 million per annum, the same sum provided by government in 2007 … The organisation is in a constant state of asking itself how it can deliver, with relevance and creativity, what it was established to do."

Mitzevich – who comes to Canberra via regional, university and one of the poorest state galleries – is unfazed. "It's the richest I've ever been," he says. "Of course the [efficiency] dividend has an impact on all our cultural institutions. But I have a philosophy that money follows good ideas. You have to have the conviction and the confidence and the resilience to keep advancing those ideas. It's about purposefulness and connecting and harnessing a collective achievement."

On the back of Mitzevich's AGSA office door are two reminders, "Be Kind" and "Be Thoughtful." Another word – "Purposeful" – is scrawled across a whiteboard. As Good Weekend accompanies him on his second-last day at the AGSA, Mitzevich is unfailingly generous, forthcoming, considerate. He is also circumspect, careful, on-message and on-mission. You get the sense he's come too far for mishaps, and that mission – art and the way it can transform an individual and a community – matters too much. It is palpable around the table at Osteria Oggi.

"The thing we have in common is our love of art," Mitzevich says. "It empowers us; Del and Ben are empowered by doing it, I'm empowered by being around it and sharing it with others. We all have been bitten by it and it won't let go." There's a clear sense that, with Mitzevich's appointment, Australian art and artists may be entering a new and more hopeful era; that this victory – like the plates that keep arriving – will be shared.

Quilty, a trustee at the Art Gallery of NSW, has high hopes for what Mitzevich's arrival in Canberra could mean. "The NGA should be the federal museum and it's not," he says. "It should be the institution that changes the way the arts are seen in the whole country, and I reckon finally we have someone there who can make a difference."

Mitzevich had signalled his intent in his farewell speech a couple of hours earlier, delivered against a backdrop of artists summoned from the audience. "For many years we did dead artists so well. I just thought I might try the ones with a pulse," he joked. He explains it over dinner as the plates keep coming. "I called them up because they have been such a part of Adelaide and they have to be part of the National Gallery, part of its DNA and its future. The NGA is a young institution, it doesn't have a big historical collection. Its strength is in the 20th century and its future will be in the 21st century. My time will be limited, as everyone's is, so during that time I'm just going to be passionate and focused on what I think are the important things of the moment."

This work, "Allegoria Sacra" (Sacred Allegory) by Russian art collective AES+F, was projected onto AGSA’s facade during the 2012 Adelaide Fringe. Credit: Courtesy of Art Gallery of South Australia

Monday July 2, 2018 will not be the first time Nick Mitzevich has turned up for work at the National Gallery of Australia. Almost 20 years ago, he arrived as a young curator on a short-term contract – and didn't come back the next day. It was in 1999, during Brian Kennedy's accident-prone reign, which itself followed the death of NGA director Betty Churcher's natural successor, Michael Lloyd, another period marked by reports of infighting and tumult. The controversial end of the directorship of Ron Radford in 2014, another well-regarded AGSA director with a knack with donors, indicates just how different Canberra can be from a state gallery. You begin to wonder if Mitzevich might not be wise to take a leaf from his own earlier NGA playbook.

Not a chance, he says. "The scale wasn't right for me then," he says. "I was young. It looked enormous, like this big corporation, and I like working on an intimate level. So that afternoon I went to see my boss and said, 'If you don't mind I won't take the contract. This isn't right for me; it won't work out and you won't get the best out of me.'" Instead he returned to the University of Newcastle, lecturing on fine arts, a job he loved.

It's a curious sidelight onto someone who always seems to be on top of his game. But Mitzevich has a farmer's sense of timing and season; a politician's instinct for picking his battles. And he hasn't always been on top of his game. As a kid growing up on a small farm outside Cessnock in the NSW Hunter Valley, he was a cuckoo in the nest of both small-town Australia and his adored and adoring family. "School wasn't easy," he says. "Growing up with a foreign-sounding surname at Kurri Kurri High, being creative and being gay, I had three strikes against me.

"People who knew me at school would have said I was shy and an introvert. That was how I protected myself from bullying, to withdraw – and to study. Academic success was one way of feeling worthy when the society around you continually, sometimes purposefully and sometimes incidentally, made you feel unworthy."

His family exemplified an optimistic, post-war moment in Australia that spawned any number of ennobling public institutions, from the Sydney Opera House to the NGA. His Greek maternal family had been reunited here by the Red Cross after World War II, during which his mother, Chrisoula, spent time in an orphanage in Greece. His Macedonian father, Nick, was one of 13 children, only three of whom survived into adulthood, and went to work at BHP Newcastle at 15, when his father died. Nick senior kept chicken and pigs in the yard at home until he saved enough to buy a bare eight-hectare plot, which he began to transform into a farm.

His parents met when his maternal grandfather, a cook and caterer, went to buy a pig from Mitzevich's father accompanied by his daughter. "My mother was a beautiful, glamorous, sophisticated woman who gave it all up," Mitzevich says. "She went and lived in a tin shack with my father and became this extraordinarily strong and tough farmer."

Born in 1970, as the NGA was being planned (it opened in 1982), Mitzevich junior was a honeymoon baby, the eldest of four and an only son. "I am called Nick, like my father, I have a beard, like my father, I look like him and I was his apprentice as a young boy. I grew up on the farm and had chores, and they worked seven days a week and never had a holiday." His parents instilled two imperatives in their children. The first was "that we had to do something for a worthy cause". All the Mitzevich kids would become – in the broadest sense – public servants. "My baby sister Bridgette is a lieutenant colonel in the Australian Army, my middle sister Sharon is a senior crime scene investigator for NSW Police and the closest sister to me, Sonia, is a nurse."

The second was that as long it was worthy "we could be and do anything we wanted", Mitzevich says. "They let us follow our passions. They let us run." His crystallised early and never wavered. When he was 15, his mother bought him a copy of Robert Hughes' The Shock of the New, which he still owns, dog-eared, taped at the spine and endlessly annotated. A few years later, he went on a school excursion to one of the great early blockbuster exhibitions, Gold of the Pharaohs, at the Art Gallery of NSW. "I just fell in love," Mitzevich says. "Nothing could stop me after that."

When he announced he was studying art, his parents "rolled with the punches", he says. "They were bemused, because we never had art in the house or any friends or family with any connection to it." He initially studied to practise, even exhibiting at Newcastle Art Gallery in 1993, before undertaking further studies in art history and education. A university excursion to Canberra proved a further watershed. "I couldn't believe it. I saw the Andy Warhol and the Dali; everything I only knew in reproduction was on the walls."

But it wasn't only the paintings. Mitzevich also glimpsed his future. "I saw Betty [Churcher] giving a tour to what looked like a diplomatic group," he recalls. "I walked away from my group to listen to her and I was just mesmerised by the way she had everyone in the palm of her hand and the way she talked about art. I had never heard anyone talk about art that way. I said to myself, 'Wow! – I'd love to be her one day.' "

No one who knows Mitzevich today would describe him as an introvert. Art was what changed him, he says; his evangelical belief in its transformational power is based on lived experience. "I wish I had challenged the bullying and challenged people's perceptions of me growing up. That's why I want to make sure that what I do develops an inclusive and tolerant Australia and give people the gift of seeing the world through an artist's eye."

George Baldessin's pears outside the National Gallery of Australia. Credit: Alamy

The opportunity to accomplish that on a national scale is what persuaded Mitzevich to take the NGA job – and he did have to be persuaded. He was the NGA selection panel's unanimous recommendation – from 50 candidates, a "short list of 10 and a short-short list of five, including two internationals", as one insider puts it. But he did not even join the process until applications had closed.

"Nick was on everybody's short list from the start," says someone close to the process. "But he was making it pretty clear he wasn't moving because he still had a job to do in Adelaide." That included securing the funding – with an election looming – for Adelaide Contemporary. When headhunters came hunting again, Mitzevich told them a call from NGA chairman Allan Myers QC might help make up his mind. Concepts such as "national service" and "your country needs you" were invoked. It did the trick.

Mitzevich has been talked about for big jobs, from the Art Gallery of NSW to the National Gallery of Victoria, almost from his arrival in Adelaide. "Why would I give up a state gallery that I've lovingly crafted, to which I've given my heart and soul, for another state gallery?" he says. "I'd feel I had betrayed myself; it's just a difference of scale and I'm not interested in scale, I'm interested in the job and the agenda.

"I want to contribute to something that adds to the Australian community, because my parents instilled that purposefulness, that service. That you shouldn't waste a moment and you should do what you can to make this country a better place. The NGA job offers a national platform that is critical for Australia's cultural evolution. I want to revive general interest in Australian art and elevate the position of artists in our society, to lead a revision of how we might tell the story of Australian art and artists."

Mitzevich is taking the job while he still has the energy, enthusiasm and drive to shake things up. And, funding aside, many of the problems of the past – the provenance issues, a $25-million cost overrun on the gallery's 2010 extension, what some saw as undisciplined collecting – have been put to rest during Vaughan's tenure. Michael Lynch, who has chaired the Adelaide Contemporary steering committee and is now helping look for Mitzevich's AGSA replacement, says the timing is right. "[The NGA] absolutely needs a different approach. It's a national asset, it's never really occupied the position of leadership it should within the visual arts. It's always tended to be eclipsed by the fighting directors around the country."

As for how Mitzevich plans to turn the tide, he says he won't know until he arrives. But his AGSA playbook provides hints, not least the way he used acquisitions and commissions to create defining moments that galvanised attention, debate and support. Like when he projected an AES+F video work onto the AGSA's Victorian façade during the 2012 Adelaide Fringe. Or when he bought Ben Quilty's entire 16-painting 2010 show Inhabit to celebrate the AGSA's 130th anniversary. Or – most emblematic of all – when he hung an epoxy resin sculpture of two horses, headless and intertwined, from the ceiling of the historic Melrose Wing.

In AGSA’s Melrose Wing of European Art, Mitzevich hung a sculpture of two headless horses, "We Are All Flesh", by Berlinde De Bruyckere.Credit: Sam Noonan

The work, We Are All Flesh, by Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere, managed to echo simultaneously the Rodin sculpture next to it, an early 17th-century sculpture of St Sebastian in the corner, and the gallery's most famous painting, Tom Roberts' A break away!

"The Butcher of North Terrace", trumpeted The Advertiser, providing Mitzevich with both the sort of publicity he could never have afforded and a ready-made platform to explain why contemporary art mattered.

"Nick has a good eye and his punts have been pretty close to the mark," observes Sydney Morning Herald art critic John McDonald. "Like Tony [Ellwood at the NGV], he doesn't have any pretensions to be a scholar or an intellectual. He sees himself as somebody who wants to run a gallery. He's a listener and a learner."

Not that everyone admires such curatorial flourishes. To some, the energy of the AGSA's thematic hang, which slams contemporary works up against classics, has come at the expense of harmony, chronology, even taste. "It's art as spectacle," says one art-world figure of the overall approach. "Beige with sparkles, like all Australian museology," says another. "Kitschevich" a third.

But all bewail the trend more than the man. And there is no doubt that trend – contemporary art as a mode of engaging new audiences to increase everything from visitation to tourism – is only intensifying around the globe. From London's Tate Modern, visitation to which was more than double the other three Tate sites within a year of its opening in 2000, to the new Herzog & De Meuron-designed Tanks at Tate Modern, spaces dedicated to "live" art. From Hobart's Museum of Old and New Art to Adelaide Contemporary and the Art Gallery of NSW's $344 million Sydney Modern project, due to open in 2021.

Nor is Mitzevich dismayed by his detractors. "I've been poked all my life," he says. "I don't care. The greatest things in Australian cultural life have happened when people have been confident about their point of view." He knows, too, that he cannot rely on old tricks; that the NGA will require him to master a new game. A staff more than three times the size of Adelaide's means he cannot maintain the same hands-on involvement in all areas, that he will have to delegate more, jump between areas, stay out of the weeds.

"The staff who want to improve ... he will have on his side in days or weeks," predicts his AGSA deputy, Mark Horton, who is running that gallery while the search for a new director is underway. "He calls it bouncing with him – 'Will you bounce with me?' He needs his energy to be reflected and multiplied. He will find the people who can help him."

And as for his predecessors, particularly Churcher and Mollison? "I'll look back on what they did and the things that were critical moments for the institution and try to build on, rather than emulate, them," Mitzevich says. "I'll try to do what is right for this time."

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the very public life of the sixth director of the National Gallery of Australia is that he has an equally three-dimensional private life. He guards the divide between work and home jealously. And it's physical as well as notional, marked by what must be the only major piece of Australian road infrastructure named for an artist, the Hans Heysen tunnel, which leads up into the Adelaide Hills. Until the tunnel ends, Mitzevich transacts business. But what emerges on its other side is private Nick, citizen farmer, custodian of a remarkable 1940s bungalow, built from local Basket Range sandstone by the South Australian ceramicist Thelma Fisher.

Bill Henson's cover shot of the director.

You certainly see why Mitzevich coveted the property for half a decade before finally securing it three years ago: the house is a prism of light, its floor-to-ceiling windows offering a different view from every room of the large garden, complete with vegetable patch and orchard, Australian natives, lilies, camellias and giant magnolias. Mitzevich spends a day a week tending the garden and repairing the winding paths that took a stone mason two years to complete. There's a vast pond that he and Rob have re-concreted and waterproofed, a glade with a fire pit and hammocks where they hang out. Weekends are sacrosanct.

"The garden and time with Rob are what I don't compromise," he says. "I love to plant and grow things. It sustains me and gives me balance, because these jobs aren't just jobs. I call them indentures, not because you're shackled to them, but because you love them so much they become more than jobs. I know that, so I just don't let it ruin my life."

No one from his gallery life comes up here. Nor does Rob enter his work life. "He never accompanies me to official events, not because I don't want him to, just because he didn't sign up to that; it's my job, not his. He's an intelligent individual. I want him to have his life and his focus and I don't compromise our relationship."

Good Weekend is allowed in only because this safe house is already bust. As for the one that will replace it, Mitzevich is looking for another very private bolt hole that will enable him to "put roots down and be part of the community". He already has something of it in his mind's eye. "I want my next garden to be a native Australian garden because if I'm in the national capital, leading the national institution, I want to be surrounded by the brand – brand Australia."

In a real sense, too, the National Gallery will itself be his new property. "I've always thought that running galleries is a lot like running a farm," he says. "You have to be kind to the earth, you have to work with the resources you have. You have to be gentle, and you have to be focused and purposeful." It's a rare combination, observes the AGSA's Horton. "Not everybody with power and influence is kind. They can use it callously to get what they need, but Nick never does. He has enormous confidence, but there's also a hint of vulnerability that he shows."

But then for Mitzevich, kindness is also purposeful. "I'm tougher than I look and I'm hard when I need to be, but only when I need to be. Adelaide has not been the land of milk and honey. Resources have been limited and it hasn't been on the agenda, so I had to fight really hard to make things happen. But I'm more comfortable with the soft side because that's how I get more things done."

Mitzevich at the 2014 Adelaide Biennial.Credit: Courtesy of the Art Gallery of South Australia

"Call it the Mitzevich magic," an AGSA donor muses as the April farewell party breaks up. "He's someone who transforms the mundane because he can smell colour, hear an extra octave." As he says it, the man himself passes by. "Don't let them chew you up," the donor calls out. "In fact, don't change anything."

"Thanks," Mitzevich says, stopping to shake his hand. Then that shy smile of his flashes. "I will change everything."

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald or The Age.