Quotes of the Day

Spring is in the air at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art. Each September, the gallery celebrates the budding talents of the Australian art world, and this year's "Primavera" has the riotous colors of hothouse flora. Taking as its subject the painted landscape, it's a terrific show - from the airily spiritual (Pedro Wonaeamirri's totem poles) to the patently superficial (Jemima Wyman's fluoro forests). While at times dark in theme (in particular, Madeleine Kelly's ecological dreamscapes are eerily resonant of inundated New Orleans), it's enough to raise your spirits about the state of contemporary art. The buoyant mood continues upstairs on the fourth floor, where the museum has unveiled an expanded space dedicated for the first time to its permanent collection and new acquisitions. Hard to believe that six years ago the MCA was faced with a crippling deficit and possible closure. "It does feel like the contemporary moment has finally come," says director Elizabeth Ann Macgregor.

With a slew of spring shows and new spaces, modern art's resurgence is happening on both sides of the Tasman. On the western slopes of Albert Park next to the Auckland Art Gallery, the ancient pohutukawa trees are readying their Christmas blooms. As well they might, since the trees helped inspire a four-year, $63 million redevelopment of the country's oldest gallery, announced in July. "We want to open the building up to the park," says director Chris Saines, "and that's going to give a whole new burst of engagement with the city." In Brisbane, Australia, Saines' former boss at the Queensland Art Gallery, Doug Hall, is keenly watching what the Kiwis are doing. Since becoming director in 1987, Hall began "a policy shift that took our gaze north and east," he says. Not only has he amassed one of the world's finest collections of modern Asian and Pacific art but, as of August next year, he will have a glassy new gallery in addition to the current one to display it in. Hall describes the $82 million Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (200 m along the Brisbane River from the QAG) as a floating pavilion, "and there's nothing more democratic."

Yet only three years ago, when Sydneysiders were asked to vote on a similar plan for the harborside MCA, they gave it the thumbs-down. European architects Sauerbruch Hutton had won an international design competition to redevelop the former Maritime Services building (one scheme involved a "lightbox" over the existing art deco edifice; another had it demolished and replaced with what detractors likened to a petrol station). But public support waned, and the plan was eventually scrapped. Instead, director Macgregor set about improving the existing building, turning around the museum's deficit, and widening its community outreach; for the first time this year, "Primavera" will tour the country when its Sydney season ends in November. "My philosophy has always been that a museum is much more than a building," Macgregor says. "The organization is about the relationship it builds beyond its walls."

Sydney's loss has been Brisbane's and Auckland's gain. Voted the most popular design of those shortlisted for the MCA was an elegantly fanned Moving Image Museum at the Harbour Bridge end of the site. Its architect, Sydney's Richard Francis-Jones, now finds himself at the helm of the Auckland redevelopment. With the original 1887 French chateau–style building overrun by storage and an unwieldy airconditioning system, Francis-Jones was faced with a similarly tricky heritage site. His solution has been to restore the existing spaces and double their area with what he calls a "hovering canopy" of sunlit new galleries running off a central atrium to the north; he likens it to "an architectural forest." It's one director Saines hopes will give a fuller picture of New Zealand and international art than the gallery has been allowed to show before.

With the current museum split between the old clock-tower building and a contemporary wing across the street (the restored telephone exchange is now celebrating its 10th birthday), the plan for Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki 2009 is to seamlessly blend the two. Here audiences will be able to segue from a McCahon to a Moore, a Picasso to a Parekowhai. And if anyone can architecturally blend the old with the new, it's Francis-Jones (whose firm FJMT is overseeing the works with Auckland's Archimedia). In June, his redesign for the Sydney headquarters of the Historic Houses Trust won the top awards of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects; judges praised his "metamorphosis of the 1850s Mint from a cluster of ruinous and neglected shells to a superb ensemble of restored, adapted and invented forms and spaces."

Meanwhile, Sydney's plan for a Moving Image Museum is being resurrected on the Brisbane River. While local firm Architectus' competition-winning design does appear to float, with a 12-m winged canopy and 9,000 sq. m of glass, the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art is anchored by the black box of a cinema at its base. Two theaters and an exhibition space will form the hub of Australia's first Cinematheque within an art museum, when it opens with the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in November 2006. "One of the most important visual arts of the 20th century is cinema," says director Hall, who hopes to present film, video and art in "this nice seamless interconnection." Kick-starting the film program next month is the exhibition "Kiss of the Beast," which uses the original 1933 King Kong to explore the relationship between man and beast in art. (Nice timing, Brisbane: Peter Jackson's new version of the ape epic is set to open worldwide in December.)

A few factors have brought about what Macgregor calls "the contemporary moment" now flourishing on both sides of the Tasman. In Auckland, it was an antiquated building at odds with the growing demand and stature of modern art - a problem embarrassingly revealed when the gallery was unable to accommodate Michael Stevenson's Trekka car from the Venice Biennale because of insufficient space. Director Saines expects visitor numbers to double to 500,000 a year when the new gallery opens in 2009. In Brisbane, says director Hall, the catalyst was government-driven "cultural diplomacy," putting the state's engagement with Asia and the Pacific into concrete form. Just last month, the gallery purchased 20 new works by Niuean-New Zealander painter John Pule, helping to remedy Australia's blind spot on contemporary Pacific art. "That they're looking to the region is exciting and great for all of us," says the MCA's Macgregor.

When the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art rises King Kong–like next year, Macgregor's museum will lose its title as the country's largest exhibitor of contemporary art, though it will perhaps remain the edgiest. (Indeed, it's hard to think of another local institution gutsy enough to take on Ed Kienholz's sex-and-violence-splattered junkshop assemblages, as the MCA will do in December.) Wandering around its modest new permanent collection space, one senses a cultural flowering just as important as any glassy cathedral to contemporary art. Here the fiberglass manta ray and skater-boy video of former "Primavera" artists James Angus and Shaun Gladwell sit happily alongside such contemporary jewels as Jean Tinguely's kinetic sculpture and bark painter John Mawurndjul's rainbow serpent. Here, and across Australasia, spring has sprung.

• Michael Fitzgerald
• Contemporary art is blooming in Australasia, with vibrant shows and ambitious gallery plans bursting out all over