Australian architect Corbett Lyon's expansion to the Lyon Housemuseum in Melbourne has opened. The new public galleries, located adjacent to the original museum, offer space for local and international events, as well as exhibitions and installations. After establishing the Lyon Housemuseum in 2009, Lyon and his wife have been been expanding their collection with a range of work from the likes of Patricia Piccinini, Howard Arkley and Brook Andrew.
Located in Melbourne’s suburban inner-east, the Housemuseum Galleries will stage public exhibitions and be open year-round. “From its inception, our intention has been to share with others the experience of contemporary art interwoven with the spaces and artifacts of a living, family home,” said Lyon. “With the new Housemuseum Galleries we will continue to explore and experiment with traditional concepts of art and architecture, pushing the ideas we began to explore in the original Housemuseum and inviting wider conversations and engagement in the fields of contemporary art, architecture and design.”
The public contemporary art space is clad in bluestone sourced from a quarry in western Victoria. The exterior facade was made to play off the corbeled brickwork of the orinigal Housemuseum fence. Inside, a central space is wrapped by four peripheral exhibition spaces. The galleries were designed atop artist Reko Rennie's Visible Invisible, an artwork painted on the ground-floor slab before construction began in 2017. The gallery’s inaugural exhibition ENTER is curated under Fleur Watson with a range of works to “contest the neutral white box.” The Lyon family funded the construction of the galleries through a $14.5 million donation.
