Art Gallery of New South Wales

The gallery's real strength is unevenly distributed rather than broad: a small, well-chosen run of European Old Masters and 19th-century French painting in the historic building; genuine depth in 19th and 20th century Australian painting; one of the country's most significant standing collections of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, now spread across both buildings; and, since 2022, a purpose-built home for large-scale contemporary commissions in Naala Badu and the Tank that the gallery did not have anywhere to show before.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales is now formally two buildings joined by a public garden. Naala Nura, meaning seeing Country in the Sydney language, is the original 1897-1909 sandstone building facing the Domain parklands. Naala Badu, meaning seeing waters, is the glass-walled extension that opened in December 2022 and steps down the hillside toward Woolloomooloo Bay and the harbour beyond. Both names were adopted in April 2024 after consultation with Aboriginal stakeholders, the gallery's Indigenous Advisory Group and its Board of Trustees, replacing the plain functional labels the two buildings had carried since the newer one opened. A visitor moving between them crosses a landscaped art garden built over what was once a disused road cutting and rail corridor, itself planted with native species and outdoor sculpture and open to walk through even outside gallery hours.

The historic building began in 1895 under colonial architect Walter Liberty Vernon, opened in stages from 1897, and had its full sandstone facade completed only in 1909. The names carved along its pediment and entablature, Michelangelo, Ghiberti, Phidias, Cellini, Canova and others, announce the building's ambition plainly: a temple to the European canon on the far side of the world from it. Inside, the barrel-vaulted, top-lit Grand Courts still hang European painting and sculpture from the 15th to the 20th century in the dense, salon-style manner the building was designed around, alongside the gallery's historical Australian collection. International visitors sometimes find the European holdings modest set against the great encyclopaedic museums of Europe and North America, and that is a fair comparison to make; what the building holds instead is a small number of real, well-chosen things, from a Bronzino court portrait to Streeton's Fire's on, rather than depth across every school and century.

The idea for a second building dates to a 2008 masterplan, and the project that became known as Sydney Modern ran from 2013 to 2022, costing roughly 344 million Australian dollars in public and philanthropic funds. Pritzker Prize-winning architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA, working in Australia for the first time, designed a sequence of four linked glass pavilions rather than a single large volume, nearly doubling the gallery's total exhibition space when it opened on 2 December 2022. Underneath the new building sits its most unusual space: the Tank, a 2,200 square metre chamber of 125 concrete columns built during the Second World War to store naval fuel for the Allied Pacific fleet, decommissioned decades ago and now given over each year to a single large-scale commission rather than a standing collection display. The project has been genuinely divisive since it was first floated under former director Edmund Capon, and that argument has not settled simply because the building opened; see Reception below for how sharply visitors and architecture critics still disagree about it.

Yiribana opened in 1994 as one of the first galleries in an Australian art museum built specifically to show Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art on its own terms, and it has since grown well beyond its original room, with First Nations work now spread through dedicated spaces in Naala Badu as well. The collection ranges from bark painting made in Arnhem Land communities such as Yirrkala, including recent acquisitions like Nonggirrnga Marawili's lightning-charged Baratjala, to large collaborative-style desert paintings from the APY Lands such as Sylvia Ken's Seven Sisters, through to contemporary First Nations photography and moving image. Visitor reviews return to this part of the gallery more than to any other single wing, frequently describing it as the most rewarding or most moving section of a visit, and often rating it well above the historic European collection a short walk away.

Beyond the Grand Courts and Yiribana, the gallery keeps a dedicated suite of Asian art galleries opened in 2003, covering Chinese ceramics and painting, Japanese screens and prints, Korean art and South and Southeast Asian sculpture and textiles, one of the more comprehensive such holdings outside Australia's national collecting institutions. Twentieth-century Australian painting is strong throughout, from Arthur Boyd and William Dobell to Brett Whiteley, whose 1975 harbour painting The balcony 2 hangs as one of the collection's set pieces. Naala Badu carries the contemporary programme forward with rotating exhibitions and a set of site-specific commissions made for the building's 2022 opening, among them Yayoi Kusama's Flowers that Bloom in the Cosmos on a terrace above the bay and Ken Unsworth's suspended stone sculpture, both now among the most photographed single works in the entire collection.

The gallery's history is not free of the questions that follow any collecting institution of this age. In 2001 nine works in the collection were flagged as potentially having passed through Nazi-era forced sales or confiscations, prompting internal provenance research; the gallery has not published a single consolidated public account of how each of those nine cases was resolved, and that gap is worth naming plainly rather than assuming settled. A 17th-century painting by Frans van Mieris was stolen from the gallery in 2007 and has not been recovered. None of this erases what the collection does well, but a museum is a party to provenance as much as a host to art, and a page about this one should say so rather than only listing what is on the walls.

Visitors consistently single out two things: that the permanent collection is free in both buildings, and that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander galleries are the strongest single reason to come, often rated above the historic European wing. Reaction to Naala Badu itself is far more divided than reaction to the collection inside it, with the same building called soaring and light-filled by some visitors and cavernous or corporate by others, a split that shows up in professional architectural criticism as well as in visitor reviews