Australian Bicentennial Wing, 1988

The Art Gallery of New South Wales annual report for 1980 noted that designs had been drawn up for an extension and that ‘it would be desirable if [the building] could be completed by 1988’. These designs were presented to the government in 1981, only to be rejected the following year. A feasibility study was commissioned in 1984, with the extensions approved towards the end of that year. Building began in May 1985. An article in The Canberra Times noted that the ‘new $17.5 million wing should be completed in time for the Bicentenary celebrations … The new wing’s four storeys will increase gallery space by about 50 per cent and enable it to hang more of its collection. The roof will serve as a sculpture garden, with other parts of the wing devoted to Asian art, prints, drawings, photography, education and a new theatre for lectures and films. The ground floor will be given over to 20th century Australian art’.

The four storeys of the new building were constructed at the rear of the Art Gallery, with a stepping profile that followed the rake of the land. Andrew Andersons, who had so successfully completed the 1968–72 extensions, was project architect. His building, like the previous extension, won the Sulman Award for Architectural Merit and was praised for the way the conjunctions between the two extensions were so discreet that visitors were unaware of them. Architecture critic Elizabeth Farrelly wrote that Andersons’ two major extensions had transformed the Art Gallery ‘into one of Australia’s most distinguished buildings and established Andersons as one of our most accomplished architects. Other galleries are more virtuosic, turning more tectonic tricks, making more personal statements, more loudly. But the NSW gallery, having rediscovered the great art of understatement, succeeds where they do not’. Two thousand people were present when NSW Premier Nick Greiner declared the building open on 11 December 1988.