National Gallery of Australia

The National Gallery of Australia opened in 1982 in a purpose-built brutalist concrete building designed by Colin Madigan. It sits on the Parkes side of the parliamentary triangle, between the High Court and the National Library, and holds the largest art collection in the country with more than 155,000 works across every medium.

The Indigenous Australian art galleries are the heart of the collection and are widely regarded as the most important public display of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art in the world. The centrepiece is the Aboriginal Memorial, a forest of 200 hollow log coffins from Central Arnhem Land created by 43 artists from the Ramingining community. The gallery also holds major works by Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Rover Thomas, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and many other significant Indigenous artists.

The Australian art collection covers the full span of colonial and modern Australian art, from early convict-era watercolours through the Heidelberg School (Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder) to contemporary work by Fiona Hall, Tracey Moffatt and Patricia Piccinini. The international collection includes works by Monet, Pollock, Rothko and Warhol, and the Asian art galleries hold one of the strongest Southeast Asian collections outside the region.

The sculpture garden is a major attraction in itself, spread across the lakeside grounds. James Turrell's Within Without, a Skyspace installation built into a volcanic-shaped mound, is one of only a handful of permanent Turrell works in the southern hemisphere. Fujiko Nakaya's fog sculpture fills the courtyard with artificial mist at scheduled intervals. Entry to the permanent collection and the sculpture garden is free year-round, with ticketed entry for major travelling exhibitions.