National Gallery of Australia plans very different summer when lockdown ends

Over at the National Gallery of Australia, statues and paintings have been covered, water features drained and staff sent home.

It's a scene that has played out in some version or another in buildings across the city, although it's particularly jarring for one that's designed to be open 364 days of the year - every day except Christmas.

Director Nick Mitzevich hopes by Christmas Day, the gallery will be closed as a matter of course, rather than because of the pandemic.

But it will be a strange summer, the first without an international blockbuster for many years.

Large-scale art exhibitions - the kinds that draw thousands of interstate visitors and large queues - have long been a Canberra summer staple.

But delays in the international art world mean even the best-laid plans have been delayed, in some cases by several years.

The NGA was open for most of the last year and even managed to stage its much-anticipated Boticelli to Van Gogh: Masterpieces from the National Gallery, London, albeit with British curators supervising via Zoom, and varied crowds due to sporadic lockdowns throughout last summer.

"You have to remember that most of the international galleries have only just gone back," Mr Mitzevich said.

"The Louvre, the Tate, the Met, they were all closed for many, many months, so if you borrow one work, the whole process for it to be condition-checked, reframed, conserved, then packed and crated and sent ... there are these are snowball delays that happen. Most projects won't be cancelled, most projects will just have to have their timeframes recalibrated. That's kind of where we're at."

Meanwhile, the gallery's next major show, a retrospective of Australian artist Jeffrey Smart marking the 100th anniversary of his birth and due to open next month, is also likely to be delayed.

Staff and contractors are unable to start preparing the temporary exhibition space - a process that can take many weeks.

But plenty of work is still going on behind the scenes, including plans for the gallery building's 40th anniversary, just over a year away.

Mr Mitzevich said the anniversary would be about celebrating the building itself, and staff had already begun stripping back some of the internal tweaks made by different curators and directors over the years.

These include revealing windows that had previously been covered with plasterboard, moving temporary walls, and playing up some of the building's best features.

"Nearly 20 windows that have been plasterboarded over have recently been reopened," he said.

"[The plasterboarding] was done to maximise hanging space, and what that does is turn the building into a bit of a white box.

"The building's original intent was to put a very modern perspective on a new gallery, and so when the government decided to build and assemble a national collection and a National Gallery, they wanted it to reflect a modern world."

But the gallery's governing document, the Linsday Report of 1966, specified the NGA should not emulate what was happening in other galleries, either in Australia or the rest of the world.

"Architect Colin Madigan and his colleagues constructed a building that was to reflect the modern age, and that modern age was about form and space and dimension," Mr Mitzevich said.

"That's what the original National Gallery building was, and materials were very important to that, the sort of democracy of materials - simple glass and concrete and stone.

"And so what we're doing is paring things back to the original architecture, revealing the materials, the concrete, the glass windows, so the experience of visiting the gallery can really be memorable because the architecture has lots of unique features.

"For much of the gallery's life, what was in fashion in gallery curatorial practices was the white box. But what we are now seeing is non-traditional spaces being used and the uniqueness of spaces being celebrated."

Visitors will be able to see some of these features once the gallery re-opens, including a new hang of the Australian collection.

But Mr Mitzevich warned this wouldn't happen from one day to the next.

"You can't just flick a switch and open the door tomorrow - it does take a while to get everything back up and running," he said.

"It's a big machine, and we're used to doing maintenance and safety checks and keeping it going 24/7.

"While we're shut we have wound a lot of its functions down, and it takes a while to wind it back up."

Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content: