Melbourne’s Lyon Housemuseum to open new public gallery

The Lyon Housemuseum has unveiled the design of a new $14.5-million expansion that will become a new public gallery.

The new building will be constructed adjacent to the existing Lyon Housemuseum on Cotham Road in Kew in Melbourne’s east, which opened in 2009.

Designed by architect Corbett Lyon, the Housemuseum serves as his family’s private home while also displaying their extensive contemporary art collection. It opens to the public for pre-booked tours and events on designated days throughout the year.

However, the planned new Lyon Housemuseum Galleries will expand that access. From mid-2018, a new building adjacent to the existing house will house a public contemporary art museum.

The Lyon Housemuseum Galleries will show objects from the Lyon collection, which includes more than 350 works by 50 Australian artists and continues to grow. But it will also provide spaces for local and international of contemporary, architecture and design.

Commenting on the expansion, Lyon explained “the response has been really overwhelming and we’ve had people come to visit from all over the world.

“So when the opportunity came up to acquire the property next door ... we thought rather than extend the private housemuseum, we would build a new public museum.”

The new public gallery will sit together with the existing building like “a kind of familial pair,” Lyon said, adding “they (will) share an architectural connection in terms of their DNA.”

The internal spatial structure of the new gallery will include a large central exhibition space, which will be 26 metres long and 13 metres wide with a 5.5-metre-high ceiling, will be surrounded by four peripheral exhibition spaces, each with distinctive orientations and aspects.

The space facing the street front, for instance, will feature a large picture window.

As Lyon explained “I see that as a big street art urban wall where we’ll show large artworks and installations.”

With the exhibition space and cafe at the rear of the building to have lower ceilings and a look out onto a sculpture court, Lyon added “this is all about creating a variety of spaces in which to exhibit the art and artefacts but also providing a richer visitor experience.”

“We see the new building being very experimental like the housemuseum. That’s an underlying value and vision

“We want to extend that further in the new building and expand the agenda further to include local and international exhibitions of contemporary art, architecture and design.

“That’s a very important expansion of the areas of interest for the new museum.”

In announcing the new public gallery, the Lyon Housemuseum also unveiled a major artwork, Visible Invisible, 2017, by Australian contemporary artist Reko Rennie, which has been painted onto the entire ground-floor concrete slab of the new building.

The invited audience who had the privilege of walking on the slab at the launch are the only people who will see the whole work, as the work will be covered-up as building progesses.

The new gallery will be funded by a $14.5-million donation from the Lyon family and will be run by the Lyon Foundation. The building is due to be completed in mid-2018.

The new Lyon Housemuseum Galleries represent an apparent trend of Melbourne's art collectors opening private collections of contemporary art to the public.

Last year, Charles and Leah Justin opened the Justin Art House Museum in their purpose-designed home in Armadale to share their collection of contemporary Australian art.

In addition, the Michael Buxton Centre of Contemporary Art, a public home for Buxton's private collection under the auspices of the University of Melbourne, set to open later this year.

Images: The main gallery within the proposed new Lyon Housemuseum galleries designed by Corbett Lyon (top), the exterior of the new galleries (middle) and a model of the development. Courtesy of Lyon Housemuseum

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