Six years in the planning, three in the making, the redeveloped Auckland Art Gallery has now been unveiled.
Choi Jeong Hwa's Flower Chandelier, photo/David White
The many aspects of Korean artist Choi Jeong Hwa’s Flower Chandelier, a colossal, plump-petalled plant heaving and breathing in Auckland Art Gallery’s new north atrium, says much about the gallery’s $121 million redevelopment. You can see its lurid flowers from the street – through an elegant forest of canopied timber columns marking the bold new entrance to the gallery. You can look down on it from an elevated walkway linking the old gallery to the new. You can catch views of it from the new cafe and through the long march of ground-floor galleries. You can even see it, buds opening and closing in cheerful fecundity, from Albert Park at the back of the gallery.
Back? “An edge,” says gallery director Chris Saines. “The gallery had a back. Now it has an edge.”
Six years in the planning, three in the making, the new gallery gives a beguiling sense of looking through and beyond – glimpses of different floors, sudden sightings of the city or the park, remnants of older floor levels, long views down avenues of galleries and terraces, single works of art appearing within a framework of columns and doorways, all pulled together by a band of kauri-clad posts, some 3000 square metres of American oak flooring and windows by the country mile.
Standing on the walkway, the end of a near decade-long rebuilding process finally in sight, Saines is animated. “We’ve got vistas, we’ve got depth, we’ve got height. [The new development] joins the gallery, its roles and functions to the city and the park. That is what differentiates it from previous refurbishments and extensions – there’s that visual connectivity.”
It is a dramatic transformation of the country’s oldest public art gallery, inspired by earthquake-strengthening requirements for the 1887 Wellesley and 1916 East galleries, which were promptly recognised as an opportunity to restore the historic parts of the gallery, to increase exhibition space, to revamp back-of-house to better meet international lending requirements and to turn the sober and disjointed edifice into a landmark social and cultural venue.
“[The old gallery] was a dignified civic building, what you would find in a small provincial town outside Paris – a neo-Renaissance-French chateau-hybrid quality,” says Saines. “Over time, the building simply lost functionality. It became dated. Through the many refits and refurbishments, the building had become spatially disorganised – ramps, steps, floors not lining up and it was difficult to navigate back-of-house. We got to the point where we almost needed to compromise best international practice.”
The new design, by Sydney-based Francis-Jones Morehen Thorp and Auckland-based Archimedia (a collaboration also responsible for the University of Auckland’s new business school), has converted back-of-house and storage areas into new public and exhibition spaces, introduced a contemporary wedge of galleries, cafes, meeting and performance places, and put in place the necessary facilities – including a huge loading bay – to cope with large-scale exhibitions (Saines hints at a European modernism exhibition next year). When it opens on September 3, 800 works from the 15,000-strong collection will be on display, twice the number previously able to be shown.
With the redevelopment in its final stages of preparation, it is hard to get a measure of its sheer breadth. Gallery spaces flow from Victorian grandiosity to neo-classical self-possession to the cool demeanour of the 21st-century art museum.
In the central galleries, New Zealand works from the collection march back in time from Michael Parekowhai, Kate Newby and Shane Cotton to the romanticised 1898 The Arrival of the Maoris in New Zealand by Louis Steele and Charles Goldie. Part of the original Kitchener wing will be given up to the collection of 15 works representing major modernist European artists such as Salvador Dali, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque to be gifted by New York philanthropists Josie (now deceased) and Julian Robertson. The works will be on display until October 30.
Through the old Wellesley Gallery, gentle spaces filled with stalled time and cultural history, we enter a series of new naturally lit galleries opening onto outdoor terraces and overlooking Albert Park or steps leading down to the city.
Most successful is the integration of the old and the new, neither of which has been compromised in the interest of uniformity. A glimpse of a lower-floor level under a semi-transparent ramp (where once the gallery had 17 levels, it now has six); a monumental wedge of space between the outdoor wall of the old gallery and the unadorned surface of the new; restored detailing to the historic roofline that can be viewed from a white-walled gallery – this constant referencing to the gallery’s history beneath contemporary louvred light panels or in direct gaze of the city skyline gives a sharpness to each new space, opening the way for more experimental approaches to curatorial programming.
In many instances, the very structure of the gallery seems to be designed for specific works – it is hard to imagine any other work filling the space where Ralph Hotere’s 18-metre mural Godwit/Kuaka hangs, for example – and the subtle inscriptions into timber detailing, the very skin of the building, by Arnold Wilson, Fred Graham and Lonnie Hutchison are undeniably permanent. Yet the sheer diversity of exhibition spaces, from the graceful East Gallery (rescued from its previous role as workshops and store rooms) to the sculpture terrace, hosting Danish artist Jeppe Hein’s undulating park bench, Long Modified Bench Auckland, augurs well for an ambitious exhibition programme of visiting shows and those curated from the collection.
New space has also been given to revenue-raising function rooms, education facilities, an expanded auditorium, a bigger research library and informal amphitheatres. A staffed learning centre will encourage visitors to explore the work of individual artists represented in the collection. As the first featured artist, Reuben Paterson will be presenting Gazillion Swirl, an open invitation to manipulate and “kaleidoscope” one of the artist’s digitised paintings using interactive software developed by CoLab at neighbouring AUT University. “It’s taking painting and making it something so much more,” says Paterson. “It’s almost like creating an installation of experience.”
There will be art trails, information panels, iPad multimedia guides aiming, says Saines, not only to tell the multiple stories of New Zealand art “but to use interpretative strategies, so it’s not just a structural experience of the collection through display”.
Noisy?
“Galleries this big can be sanctuaries – places of quiet, retreat and reflection – and noisy social spaces. They have to run the gamut of all these things.”
Auckland Art Gallery director Chris Saines, photo/David White
On Saines’s desk is a mock-up of Art Toi: New Zealand Art at the Auckland Art Gallery edited by senior curator Ron Brownson, one of two books coinciding with the gallery opening (the other, I Spy New Zealand Art, is an alphabet book based on works on the walls). A comprehensive overview of the history of New Zealand art as read through the collection, the book documents a gallery that has, at least since the era of directors Eric Westbrook and Peter Tomory in the 1950s and 60s, taken on a national role in representing New Zealand and international art.
This most recent chapter in the gallery’s history has not been without obstacles. The global financial crisis hampered the Art Gallery Foundation’s goal to raise $33.4 million (it still has $12.9 million to find), a stoush over the impact on the historic Albert Park ended up in the Environment Court, and the site itself, wedged between two busy inner-city streets, a historic park and a stately oak tree (T12 in the city plan), appears devilishly constrictive. But the result – elegant, intelligent and surprisingly cohesive – is one of which the city, gearing up for an influx of some 90,000 rugby fans, and the country should be proud.
AUCKLAND ART GALLERY, reopens September 3; the same day sees the release of ART TOI: NEW ZEALAND ART AT THE AUCKLAND ART GALLEY, edited by Ron Brownson (Auckland Art Gallery, $59.95), and I SPY NEW ZEALAND ART (Auckland Art Gallery, $19.95).