Art Gallery of New South Wales
Major art museum in the Domain, with Australian, Aboriginal and international collections.
The Art Gallery of New South Wales traces its origins to 1871, when the New South Wales Academy of Art was founded in Sydney. After several temporary homes, a permanent gallery was built in The Domain, the parkland east of the city centre. The Government Architect Walter Liberty Vernon designed a classical sandstone building, with construction beginning in 1896. The first stage, with a series of daylit exhibition courts, opened in 1897, and further sections, including the colonnaded façade facing Art Gallery Road, followed in the early twentieth century.
The gallery has been extended several times. The Captain Cook Wing, designed by Andrew Andersons, opened in 1972, and a bicentennial extension completed in 1988 roughly doubled the building's size and added galleries for Asian art. In December 2022 the Sydney Modern Project opened a separate building to the north, designed by the Tokyo practice SANAA, which again almost doubled the exhibition space. In 2024 the two buildings received Aboriginal names: Naala Nura for the original building and Naala Badu for the new one.
The collection covers Australian, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, Asian, European and contemporary art. Naala Badu includes the Yiribana Gallery, dedicated to First Nations art, and The Tank, an exhibition space created in a former naval oil tank beneath the building. The gallery also presents the annual Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes, among the best-known art awards in Australia. General admission is free, with charges for some temporary exhibitions.
Highlights
- Walter Liberty Vernon's classical sandstone building in The Domain
- Naala Badu, the SANAA-designed building opened in December 2022
- The Tank, a gallery set in a former Second World War oil tank
- Yiribana Gallery devoted to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art
- Home of the annual Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes
