THE bright colours and intriguing forms start well before you enter the vast exhibition space that will show off one of Australia’s biggest gifts of art. The staircase leading down from ground level at the Art Gallery of NSW looks onto a giant white wall filled with windows that use glass in a rainbow of colours. Turn the corner at the bottom and you can see the work of such renowned contemporary artists as Richard Long, Christo, Gilbert & George and Sol LeWitt in the first of several vast spaces that will open to the public this weekend.
The art gallery’s expansion, unveiled last week, uses room that had been used for storage and gives the institution a fourfold increase in exhibition space for contemporary art. At 3300 square metres, it will be the biggest display of contemporary art in the country, the gallery says. First impressions of the new galleries devoted to the John Kaldor Family Collection are all good. This vast, clean, well-lighted space is an ideal environment for showing large works of contemporary art. It is unrecognisable from the rather shabby dungeon in which the bulk of the Art Gallery of NSW’s collection was previously stored. Not only are these rooms cleaner and brighter, they seem to have expanded.
Much has been written about the generosity of the gift, and a collection worth $35 million cannot be sneezed at. Neither should we undervalue the contribution of Morris Iemma’s state government, which spent more than $20 million building the gallery a new storage facility; or the Belgiorno-Nettis family, which gave $4 million towards the refurbishment of the space.
