New South Wales Art Gallery

If you walk east from St Mary's Cathedral, which itself is on the eastern edge of Sydney's Hyde Park, you'll come across a large expanse of parkland which is known as The Domain. The street which leads into The Domain is Art Gallery Rd, and its name becomes clear as you reach the stone and brick building that is the Art Gallery of New South Wales, whose facade looks to be of early Greek style with tall columns and steps leading into an interior of pillared archways and thence into exhibition halls and spaces.

 

 

Despite early controversies on what the gallery building should look like and several plans submitted and discarded it is amazing that the building even exists. The Art Gallery building has proved quite eminently suited for its purposes, with room for expansion and additions. At present, the Art Gallery of New South Wales has a collection of some 29,000 pieces of artworks, divided into various "curatorial areas" according to the curators who look after them.

For visitors to Australia wishing to know more of the people's art and culture, the two main areas of interest would be the Australian collection and the Yiribana Gallery. The Australian collection is described as reflecting the evolving traditions of the past 200 years of European settlement in Australia and features Australian works from the late 19th century up to the whole of the 20th.

 

These are represented through paintings, sculptures and works on paper, and include noted Australian painters of the time, such as post-impressionist Grace Cossington Smith, and Sidney Nolan and Russell Drysdale, who both painted the Australian Outback but in widely differing styles.

The gallery's other curatorial areas are the Asian, European, contemporary, photography, and prints, drawings and watercolours collections. The artworks on display are so huge in number that anyone wishing to savour the diversity and breadth of the art collections may need to visit the gallery on more than one occasion.