I’ve lived in Sydney for two years now, and for most of that time the Brett Whiteley Studio has been a locked door on Raper Street. I first ran into his work while I was studying, where he kept turning up as a reference in the kind of slides that make you scribble “look this guy up” in the margin, so when the Art Gallery of NSW reopened the studio on the weekend of 25 and 26 July, after roughly two years of building upgrades, I went as soon as I could get a free Thursday.
Alchemy, the 16-Metre Painting You See First
The first room you walk into is taken up almost entirely by Alchemy, which he painted in the early 1970s and which runs about 16 metres across on 18 wooden panels. Standing in front of it, I kept doing the same thing, stepping close to read one small corner and then backing away to see how it joined the next. A curator told the ABC that it reads left to right as a life-to-death story, starting with an exploding sun, and I could follow that arc while still getting distracted by the details: a man in a pith helmet, a road curling through the water, ears the size of boulders, a red spiral that looks like it belongs in a different painting until you notice everything else has one too. It has a lot of bodies in it, some of them fairly frank, so anyone bringing younger kids should know that going in. In front of the painting stand a handful of his carved wooden sculptures on white plinths, long limbed and slightly comic, and the way they sit against the colour behind them made this the room where I took the most photos.
Upstairs in His Studio and Living Space
Upstairs is the part I liked best. It’s the old studio and living space, and it has been left looking like he might walk back in and pick up a brush. Paint tins, spray cans and stain tins are grouped on the floor in front of an easel, a tape measure lies coiled in an open wooden case, and huge sheets of ink drawings of tangled nudes are pinned to the wall behind. Around the corner a cream bentwood rocking chair sits on a low platform with his brushes and pens laid out in a row in front of it, under an old black sign from a building that used to house The Swords Club and a manufacturing jeweller. Wendy Whiteley was consulted throughout the refurbishment, and I think it shows in how untidy it still is, in a good way.
The Photo Wall and Where His Ideas Came From
The wall of photographs and cuttings is where I spent the longest. Portraits of Bob Dylan, snapshots of friends, a pair of matchsticks, scribbled phone numbers in pencil, two old clocks, and a black rotary phone sitting underneath it all. I could see traces of Matisse, Picasso and Van Gogh in the drawings, and the music he loved and the interest in Japanese ink painting, Taoism and woodblock prints seemed to be pinned up right beside the work they fed into. I can’t remember another exhibition that lays out where an artist’s ideas came from this openly, and I suspect that mix is exactly why his paintings don’t look like anyone else’s.
The Renovated Building and the Coming Home Exhibition
The building itself is worth a look too. The Gallery says the refurbishment by Tonkin Zulaikha Greer fixed accessibility and structural problems and added a wave-shaped facade in aluminium and stainless-steel mesh, and the studio now sits inside a show called Brett Whiteley: Coming Home, which pulls together around 80 works from the 1970s. You can read more about it on the Art Gallery of NSW exhibition page, and the ABC’s guide to six of the artworks is a good primer if you’d like to know what you’re looking at before you go.
Brett Whiteley Studio Address, Opening Hours and Cost
The studio is at 2 Raper Street, Surry Hills, and it is free to enter. It has traditionally opened Thursday to Sunday from 10am to 4pm, so check the Art Gallery of NSW visit page before you go in case the hours have shifted since reopening. It’s small enough to see properly in an hour or so, and Surry Hills has plenty of cafes within a short walk for afterwards. If you’re planning a bigger Sydney day out, our guide to the best museums in Sydney and our list of school holiday activities in Sydney have more ideas, and the NSW school holiday dates are worth a look if you’re timing a visit around the term.