The National Portrait Gallery will be closed from 23 April until late-August 2019 while the building is under renovation.
When the closure was first announced last year the gallery issued a statement saying, “The need to undertake repairs reflects issues that have emerged with the building over a long period of time, some stemming from the original construction and others that have been progressively identified since the gallery has been operational.”
While the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra is being renovated several NPG exhibitions are touring Australia. “We may be closed but we are certainly not taking a break,” explains Karen Quinlan, director of the NPG. “We are off on an adventure around Australia – so if you cannot come to us, we are going to try and come to you.”
“Our favourite touring exhibitions will continue and during the closure our Access and Learning team will accompany the exhibitions to present tailored community and school programs around the country. In addition to this, our videographer will be on the road with the touring shows, meeting people at regional art galleries throughout Australia, recording interviews and creating new mini documentaries. These will be featured regularly on our website and social media channels.”
The NPG will also stage ICONS, an exhibition of contemporary photographic portraits from the collection, at Parliament House from mid-August.
For a full list of National Portrait Gallery exhibitions and events being held during the closure visit the NPG website.
In mid-September, after the gallery reopens, Quinlan will announce her exhibition program for 2020.
The National Portrait Gallery is open during the Easter holidays.
In a new collaborative exhibition at PS Art Space, in partnership with Cool Change Contemporary, five artists with process-lead practices contemplate material ethics through actively engaging in slowness and reuse.
Isaac Julien’s 2022 video work Once Again…(Statues Never Die) exposes the unseen emotional registers inherent to the struggle for colonial repatriation by mapping the places where poetics and politics intersect.
A new exhibition at the Australian National Capital Artists Inc (ANCA) asks 12 artists—including Dan Powers, S.A.Adair, Emma Beer and Lisa Sammut—to explore scale: from the miniature to the monumental.
In a conversation with Lauren Carroll Harris for her survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Julie Rrap discusses 40 years of challenging the male gaze, and the cultural invisibility of the ageing female body.
Heide Museum of Modern Art’s summer blockbuster exhibition is unveiling the breadth and beauty of Italian modernism through design. With over 170 objects spanning sixty years, Molto Bello explores the cultural impact of this period of creativity and invention.
The National Gallery of Victoria has announced the next instalment of the Winter Masterpieces series, coming in June 2025, will be a return to French Impressionism—an exhibition from 2021 that closed as soon as it opened due to the global pandemic.
