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. The housemuseum is designed by architect Corbett Lyon and is the private home of Lyon and his family. It opens to the public for pre-booked tours and events on designated days throughout the year.

“The response has been really overwhelming and we’ve had people come to visit from all over the world,” said Lyon. “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. “They [will] share an architectural connection in terms of their DNA.”

Lyon said he analysed the essential elements of the existing building to investigate how they could be used in the design of the new building.

“The forms of the two buildings relate to one another – the angular form of the housemuseum is echoed in the new building,” he said. The corbel brickwork of the original housemuseum’s fence will also be reinterpreted in the form of a textured facade on the new building, which will be clad in bluestone.

The proposed Lyon Housemuseum galleries designed by Corbett Lyon will share its architectural DNA with the existing Lyon Housemuseum.

The proposed Lyon Housemuseum galleries designed by Corbett Lyon will share its architectural DNA with the existing Lyon Housemuseum.

Image: Courtesy Lyon Housemuseum

The internal spatial structure of the new gallery will also take its cues from the existing building. 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. “I see that as a big street art urban wall where we’ll show large artworks and installations,” Lyon said. The exhibition space and cafe at the rear of the building will have lower ceilings and look out onto a sculpture court. “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,” Lyon continued. “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.”

The central gallery in the proposed Lyon Housemuseum galleries designed by Corbett Lyon.

The central gallery in the proposed Lyon Housemuseum galleries designed by Corbett Lyon.

Image: Courtesy Lyon Housemuseum

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 artwork is 44 metres long and 20 metres wide and used more than 600 litres of Dulux paint. Rennie said, “This work turns the tradition role of camouflage on its head, using it to amplify, rather than conceal my identity, and to stake my claim to a luminous, commanding form of cultural visibility.” The artwork will only be visible for a short time, and will be progressively covered over throughout the construction of the new museum. Eventually, almost the entire artwork will be concealed under a polished concrete floor with only a small portion visible in the completed building, as a hint to what lies beneath.

Visible Invisible, 2017, by Reko Rennie on the ground floor slab of the proposed Lyon Housemuseum galleries designed by Corbett Lyon.

Visible Invisible, 2017, by Reko Rennie on the ground floor slab of the proposed Lyon Housemuseum galleries designed by Corbett Lyon.

Image: John Gollings

“In the spirit of this experimental new museum, [we thought] we might mark what would be a conventional foundation laying ceremony [with] a giant artwork on the floor slab of the building,” Lyon said.

“I like the idea of having a painting that reveals itself and is then hidden to create a sense of mystery. [When we approached] Reko Rennie, he was very enthusiastic about the idea. He’s painted lots of facades of buildings but he’s never painted a floor like this. He was also really intrigued with this idea of covering the work over and hiding it.”

The idea also has links to a famous lost painting by Leonardo Da Vinci, The Battle of Anghiari, commonly referred to as the “Lost Leonardo,” which is believed to be hidden beneath the frescoes in the Palazzo Vecchio’s Hall of the Five Hundred in Florence, Italy.

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.

Time lapse video capturing installation of Visible Invisible, 2017 by Reko Rennie on foundation of new Lyon Housemuseum galleries. Videographer: Cloud Nine and Dulux Australia Courtesy Lyon Housemuseum and Dulux Australia.

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