A repurposed, underground Second World War oil reservoir is the centerpiece of Sydney Modern, the $225 million extension to the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) set to open in the Australian harbor city on 3 December 2022.
The purpose behind this expansion is to cater to an ever-increasing collection of art and increasingly ambitious exhibitions and forms of art. This expansion was announced by the director of AGNSW, Michael Brand in 2013. His vision for Sydney modern was to transform the gallery into “a truly great art museum in the Asian century, in an interconnected and digitized world”.
When it opens, Sydney Modern will almost double AGNSW’s exhibition space overnight and put an end to nearly a century of expansions and additions to the beloved but ill-fitting neo-classical, 19th-century building that has housed the AGNSW since 1897.
Sydney Modern is expansive and light-filled, its walls made of glass with a wafer-thin roof held aloft on slender steel pillars. Designed by Tokyo-based SANAA architects, the building appears simple to the eyes but technically is rather complicated. Long clean lines unobstructed by unsightly ventilation shafts are a signature of the Pritzker-prize-winning architectural firm.
The Argentine-Peruvian artist Adrian Villar Rojas was tapped for the inaugural tank commission in 2018. On his first visit, Villar Rojas understood “the power and potential of this underground realm”, he said in a statement.
The beauty of this expansion comes in the story, as the artist and his team turned to the virtual realm to create virtual environments into which the artist embedded sculptures that then underwent space and time-bending simulations.
The result is The End of Imagination, a series of large-scale sculptures that will be unveiled when Sydney Modern opens to the public on 3 December.
