National Gallery of Art, Australia

I spent a lot of today being shown around the National Gallery of Australia by Ron Radford, its Director.   I remember not liking it when I came before because of its neo-brutalist architecture, designed in the early 1970s and not opened until 1982, with huge, high-ceilinged spaces and concrete walls.   But Ron seems to have learned to live with it, restoring the original sculpture gallery with its slate floor, filling the concrete niches with Indian sculpture, putting in softer concrete walls, and even to it in a way which is deliberately sympathetic to the original, with a new wing to house which opened three years ago to house the aboriginal collection.

National Gallery of Australia

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My first blog post

Welcome to my first blog!

I’ve decided to launch into the blogosphere to celebrate the re-launch of the Royal Academy’s website in March and, also, to mark the launch of my own website (www.charlessaumarezsmith.com) which has been set up in order to ensure that I have more of a presence in the increasingly competitive digital world.

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