‘It shows that the city is coming of age’

Sydney’s new £192m gallery project is designed to lure visitors in the same way that the Opera House did nearly 50 years ago, says Helen Barrett

What does it take for a city to join Paris, New York and London on the tourist destination hit-list? A dramatic skyline, maybe. Glamour, vigour and scale. And an ambitious cultural offering: art galleries, theatres and concert halls, with the prestige to pull international artists, preferably designed by superstar architects.

This weekend sees the opening of Sydney Modern, a vast gallery project that aims to achieve just that for Australia’s biggest city. Its success depends on Sydney’s best attributes: creativity, hard work, brio – and some luck.

The AU$344million (£191.8million) campus extension to the adjacent Art Gallery of New South Wales is a big gamble, for both the NSW state and Australian tourism. It is billed as the most significant cultural offering since the opera house opened on the harbour nearly 50 years ago; a second, dazzling bauble that will pull in international visitors and “rival the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, the Guggenheim in New York”, according to NSW arts minister Ben Franklin.

“It will be one of the most important art museums in the world,” he declared, somewhat breathlessly, at a preview for the world’s press this week.

Michael Brand, the gallery’s director, is more muted: “It’s not that we’re trying to compete with those cities; it’s more a matter of trying to be as relevant,” he says. “Tate Modern was hugely relevant to how London saw itself, how it would develop and how it wanted people to visit. Now we want the same for Sydney.”

Like Sydney Opera House, Sydney Modern is expansive, facing not inland but out to the Pacific Ocean and the world beyond. The Opera House – Danish architect Jørn Utzon’s 1973 masterpiece – was Australia’s radical statement of modernity that elevated Sydney’s cultural clout and earned it global respect. Sydney Modern is something else entirely: a quietly assured, luminous companion piece.

I ask Tim Ross, an Australian broadcaster, comedian and architecture enthusiast, what the new gallery means to the city. “It follows in the footsteps of our strikingly middleaged Opera House,” he says. “It demystifies the arts through architecture that is accessible and inspiring.”

“But Sydney Modern is not like the Opera House,” says Philip Oldfield, an associate professor of architecture at the University of New South Wales. “It’s not trying to be an icon. It’s much more delicate than its neighbour. I see it as another piece of the city’s cultural fabric, not a one-off gesture.”

Sydney Modern is the work of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of Sanaa, the Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architects known for their elegantly restrained, international showpieces, such as the futuristic renovation of the art deco Samaritaine department store in Paris and the enigmatic New Museum in Manhattan.

What did they learn from Sydney Modern’s nearest cultural landmark? “With the Opera House, the structure is always enclosed but you feel the ocean when you are inside,” says Nishizawa, in town for a week of opening parties and celebrations. “That’s really special, and it’s something we tried to do.”

Their latest work is vast – Australia’s biggest art house, arranged over four galleries. Three are pristine limestone-and-glass pavilions, scattered like cards in all directions next to the city’s Royal Botanical Garden.

The international tourists crowding the chic restaurants across the water at Woolloomooloo Wharf at dusk are curious about the stack of illuminated boxes that seems to hover above the hillside opposite. “They look so pretty, like floating jewellery boxes,” an American visitor exclaims. When I tell her she is admiring Sydney’s new art gallery, she is crestfallen: “I’ll be leaving before it opens. But wow!”

Unlike its European and US counterparts, Sydney Modern avoids modern art’s canon. Inside, it is serene, hushed and, on the day I visit, sundrenched, with hard-blue skies highlighting its crisp form. The Picassos, Cezannes and Monets remain firmly in the 19th-century galleries next door. Sydney Modern showcases something entirely different: 900 contemporary artists from around the world,

It includes a gallery dedicated to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, work placed firmly in the first and most prominent of the three pavilions (before Sydney Modern, indigenous Australian art was hung in the basement of the 19th-century galleries). International visitors may not immediately recognise names such as Queenie McKenzie, Rona Panangka Rubuntja and Jonathan Jones, but they should not miss their work. It is at turns serious, funny and subversive. There are mesmerising dot paintings, of course, hung alongside conceptual pieces, ceramics and multimedia installations.

Look out, too, for Grace Lillian Lee’s Belonging series of intricate figures made from dyed goose feathers and webbing, and intriguing clusters of grimacing ku’ (dog) models by Garry Namponan, Vernon Marbendinar and more. From a distance, the latter are cute and cartoonish; close up, they are rigid with energy and poised to attack.

As seductive as its pavilion galleries and double-height atrium are, I am impatient to see Sydney Modern’s fourth gallery. The Tank is a subterranean wonder: a vast gallery in a raw concrete fuel bunker, built during the Second World War to service Australia’s navy ships. It was long decommissioned and covered in concrete slabs when Sanaa first explored this site, and it forms the rest of the gallery’s foundations.

According to Sejima and Nishizawa, the tanks were still holding oil when they uncovered them. Now they are drained, but the scent of oil still hangs in the air as I descend a ribboned staircase; traces streak the walls and its countless steel pillars.

Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, another former industrial building turned blockbuster visitor attraction, informed Sanaa’s plan. “We knew that there was value in repurposing an industrial space,” says Yumiko Yamada, a partner at Sanaa, who worked on the project. “Others had been successful, so we knew it could be successful, too.”

For all its drama and elegance, Sydney Modern is a gamble for the NSW government, which put up AU$244 million (the rest came from private donors, whose names are etched into the building’s fabric

at every turn). Will it succeed in its mission to lure international visitors in search of a culture fix to Australia’s most dynamic city – even tempt them beyond Paris, London and New York?

Probably. Sydney drew more than 40million tourists in the year before the pandemic to March 2020, and they are gradually returning. There is no shortage of ambition: a NSW “visitor economy strategy” wants the state to be “the premier visitor economy of the Asia Pacific” by 2030.

Art and culture are key to making that work. Among early efforts is South By Southwest Sydney, which next year will see the Texas-based SXSW festival and conference of arts take place outside North America for the first time in its 36-year history. Posters advertising bankable international theatrical hits such as Come From Away are all over town.

But some say tourists are likely to be cautious about the threat of extreme weather events, such as the 2019/20 “black summer” bush fires, which killed 26 people and destroyed more than 12million acres in New South Wales, and came close to outer Sydney.

Global inflation is another problem, says Olivia Ansell, director of the international Sydney Festival, which takes place in January. She describes a feeling of “euphoria” among citizens about Sydney Modern. “It shows the city’s coming of age,” she says. “But the biggest barrier may be travel prices. If you haven’t booked your trip well in advance, prices are soaring and spontaneous trips are less likely.”

Sydney Opera House may be middle-aged, but it is one of the best-loved modern buildings in the world, drawing seven million international visitors a year. It re-opened this summer after receiving a two-year, A$190million overhaul ahead of its 50th anniversary, partly funded by the NSW government, to fix acoustic problems that had existed since it was first built.

“The first performance [after the upgrade] was in July, and the musicians could hear one another properly for the first time,” says Fiona Winning, the Opera House’s director of programming. “It’s now a much finer calibration of sound wherever your seats are.”

Back at Sydney Modern, preparations are under way for the bookedout opening weekend. Ten years in the making, with a target for two million visitors in its first year, Sydney Modern is expected to lift the city’s fortunes. It has an edge over many museums in established cities: entry to its permanent collection and temporary exhibitions is free (though ticketed special exhibitions will join the programme next year).

Unlike the opaque shell forms of the Opera House, the predominantly glass Sydney Modern is unashamedly transparent. This is a deliberate strategy, says Brand: grand, neoclassical galleries can intimidate people, but here “anyone can see what’s going on, how to get inside, and how to get out again”.

As well as studying the Opera House, Sydney Modern’s architects say they strove to capture something of this city’s cosmopolitan verve and expansive character. “People are different in Sydney,” says Nishizawa. “People here are open.”