Sydney Modern gallery to welcome 15,000 visitors on opening weekend
From landscaped gardens to what lies beneath, Sydney’s newest gallery promises a different kind of cultural encounter.
Sydney’s newest art gallery, Sydney Modern, is all fresh air and sunlight above, and a thrilling subterranean adventure below.
The long-awaited second building for the Art Gallery of NSW opens to the public on Saturday, when an expected 15,000 people across the weekend will experience a new cultural campus that draws together art, architecture and landscape.
From the public plaza and art garden, visitors enter a gallery arrayed as a series of linked pavilions with displays of Indigenous art, contemporary video, painting and sculpture, and even a “participatory installation” involving fistfuls of clay. Down in the lowest level, reached by a spiral stair, is a columned, concrete basement – a former World War II oil tank – that has been transformed into a contemporary art space with an installation by Argentina’s Adrian Villar Rojas: an assembly of giant, robot-like aliens called The End of Imagination.
At a preview on Tuesday, gallery director Michael Brand led Premier Dominic Perrottet and Arts Minister Ben Franklin on a meet-and-greet with Rojas’s highly detailed creations, and the Premier appeared absorbed by the experience.
Above ground, he said the gallery was the first major new cultural building in the city since the Opera House opened almost 50 years ago.
The design by renowned Japanese architecture firm SANAA, he said, would lead an “architectural renaissance” in Sydney.
The $344m project was financed with $244m from the state government and $100m raised by the gallery. Donations have since reached $150m.
With 17,000 square metres, Sydney Modern more than doubles the size of the existing AGNSW, and a major program of art commissions has been under way.
Near the entry are New Zealand artist Francis Upritchard’s elongated figures cast in blue-coated bronze. In a domed sanctuary is a figure of Buddha in Lee Mingwei’s installation, Spirit House. Richard Lewer’s painting called Onsite celebrates some of the workers who helped build the new gallery.
In the ground-level Yiribana gallery of Indigenous art, Iluwanti Ken, from Amata in the APY Lands, spoke about her ink painting Walawulu ngunytji kukaku ananyi (Mother eagles going hunting). “It’s about the way eagles maintain a very strong family structure, a bit like us,” she said in Pitjantjatjara, via an interpreter.
The Sydney Modern gallery project includes the revitalisation of the historic AGNSW building, with new collection displays and commissions involving work by 900 artists. Entry to both buildings is free.