![COVID-19 shuts gallery doors. Picture: Supplied. Below, Jordan Wolfson's 'Colored sculpture' 2016. Picture: Dan Bradica COVID-19 shuts gallery doors. Picture: Supplied. Below, Jordan Wolfson's 'Colored sculpture' 2016. Picture: Dan Bradica](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/fdcx/doc7adc6g9frb8nig3fm9a.jpg/r0_22_3344_2281_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
The view of this weekend looked very different two months ago.
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The same could be said about any weekend, of course, but in Canberra, this one was supposed to feature a very distinctive airbourne family of mythical beasts taking to the skies.
Skywhalepapa, Patricia Piccinini's much anticipated male companion to her iconic Skywhale balloon sculpture, was set to launch at the National Gallery of Australia on May 2.
But it, along with the gallery's scheduled events and acquisitions for the next six months or more, has been pushed back as the world waits to see what lies on the other side of the coronavirus pandemic.
And even if COVID-19 - and possibly the weather - weren't factors, the edgy new balloon isn't even in the country yet. Gallery director Nick Mitzevich has confirmed that the work has been held up in Bristol, the world-leading manufacturing hub for hot air balloons, where it's still in the manufacturing process.
"It has to go through some rigorous testing, it has to be approved as a flying machine, there's a whole series of steps, so we're just not sure how long all of this will take," he told The Canberra Times.
"At the moment we have no information about when production will restart, so we just have to push it out to the furthest date that we imagine at the moment [at this stage, June 2021.
"Our whole program is really fluid, nothing's really been confirmed at all, and the things that we have up on our website are just the best guesses for the moment with the information that we have."
That's one technical marvel that's been put on the backburner. But what about the other feat the gallery has been pulling off most summers for the past three decades - the international blockbuster?
This year's was set to be a cracker - Botticelli to Van Gogh, Masterpieces from the National Gallery, London, including Van Gogh's Sunflowers, one of the world's most famous works.
While Skywhalepapa, Know My Name and a major acquisition by controversial American artist Jordan Wolfson have all been pushed back to next year, Mitzevich said it was too early to say whether the British blockbuster would also be postponed.
![Jordan Wolfson's works are said to provoke disgust and outrage. Colored sculpture 2016. Picture: Dan Bradica Jordan Wolfson's works are said to provoke disgust and outrage. Colored sculpture 2016. Picture: Dan Bradica](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/9gmjQxX8MpSQh6J68NHMnY/b3e0448d-8260-42ba-ba4b-a622245550db.jpg/r0_0_2249_2999_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
"It's still a work in progress, we're in discussions at the moment, and we still don't have clear headway yet," he said.
"It's dependent on other countries and also if our borders open, because the exhibition does include many, many masterpieces from the National Gallery of London's exhibition, and they travel with couriers and conservators who have been looking after those pictures for many, many years.
"Both the National Gallery of London and ourselves are working as hard as we can to try to come up with a solution."
He said if the exhibition was postponed, something "extraordinary" would be sure to take its place.
"If we can't make it line up, we've got a 155,000-work collection, worth $6 billion to draw from, so I have the biggest library in the country if we need to."
In the meantime, the gallery, like hundreds throughout the world, remains closed to the public, and the majority of its staff are working from home.
The gallery's iconic pieces, including Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles, shrouded in black cloth while the world waits for the pandemic to pass, were some of the defining images of the early days of the lockdown in Canberra.
"It felt like a very sad moment, that our ability to do things and see things and experience things has been restrained," he said.
"The pandemic does have a sense of sadness about the things that we can't do at the moment. I thought it was a poignant symbol of not just art but everything in our lives at the moment.
"People say to me it must be wonderful for me to be able to walk around the gallery and look at pictures, but it's not like that because everything's covered, anything that's at all sensitive is back in its boxes, and the galleries are closed for security reasons."
But even if the gallery were to reopen tomorrow, he said it would take at least three months to get everything back on track.
"It's not just about opening the doors, because the public side of the institution is only but one side of it," he said.
"We've got eight travelling exhibitions around the country, we've got about 200 loans in Australia and around the world, and there are all these works that people depend on us to get to them. There're lots of education and learning programs and so on. All of that is just on hold for the moment, and it's the same on the other end."
Still, there are some advantages to having projects on the backburner, as anticipation has more time to build.
This is already the case with the $6.8 million Jordan Wolfson commission, due to be unveiled in June next year, but already the subject of fevered speculation, and even criticism.
The artist's work, which the gallery admits provokes "a range of emotions, from amusement to fear and disgust", has long courted controversy, and the work commissioned for Canberra - the first in an Australian institution - will be a lifelike, large-scale mirrored cube with arms that "crawls, poses, thrashes around and dances to music" in response to the movements of viewers.
![Van Gogh's Sunflowers, 1888, coming - eventually - to the National Gallery of Australia. Picture: National Gallery London Van Gogh's Sunflowers, 1888, coming - eventually - to the National Gallery of Australia. Picture: National Gallery London](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/9gmjQxX8MpSQh6J68NHMnY/8c140dcc-b8b0-45bb-9e9f-1c084963bf7b.jpg/r0_0_2368_2999_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
An article in the Sydney Morning Herald last week said critics had already excoriated the acquisition as a "cultural slap in the face" and a waste of money.
Mitzevich said he found this speculation "fascinating", given the work hadn't even been completed, much less seen by anyone.
"It's already been nine months in production, it's not even half complete, and we haven't released any images, so I'm fascinated at this extraordinary interest already when the work hasn't even been made," he said.
"It is something to look forward to, there'll be lots to write and talk about, and hopefully people will come and see and make their own opinions."
He was unconcerned by the criticism, and said it was part and parcel of being at the helm of a leading, risk-taking collection.
"I've spent 30 years building collections in Australia, and these aren't ambit claims that I make," he said.
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"There are serious additions to our collection that I think will be defined in art history, because that's my job...[Gallery founder] James Mollison started the mandate to do this. He bought art history, and that's how we have this collection, and my job is to continue that.
"I'm not doing anything that's out of character for the last 38 years of collecting...I'm interested that people have such great fascination and I'm heartened that people want to know what's going on with the national collection."