Alongside NGCI’s virtual exhibition tours, a parallel project is currently underway to dramatically transform how audiences encounter art at the National Gallery. With NGCI’s permanent collection having quadrupled in size over recent years and now numbering over 300 artworks, the National Gallery has taken significant efforts to ensure access for the general public to as much of the collection as possible. Frequent collection-based summer exhibitions, such as last year’s Tropical Visions: Landscape Painting from the National Collection, have allowed NGCI’s curatorial team to highlight both hidden gems and recent acquisitions that may be less familiar to our regular audiences.
Generous support from both private donors and the Ministry of Culture allowed NGCI to significantly strengthen its holdings in 2019, adding nineteen important works to the National Collection. Through strategic rotation of our collection displays upstairs, many of these new acquisitions have since been showcased in our upper galleries, with new signage and interpretive labels acknowledging these welcome additions to NGCI’s growing collection. These rotations and new additions have thoroughly refreshed the displays in our upper gallery, and NGCI is working on a future rehang of the entire National Collection that takes advantage of our expanded offerings.
In tandem with this physical expansion, NGCI is taking the opportunity to ‘go digital’ and share our entire collection online, via support from our Dart Minds Inspired programme and the Fil Foundation, creating a user-friendly database that visitors to our site will be able to search and explore. Featuring high-resolution images, as well as descriptive labels and artist bios for each individual artwork, the newly enhanced collection page will offer teachers, students and members of the public direct access to our collections online, as well as technical information and insights about the featured artworks. The entire collection has been thoughtfully organised into five distinct categories, while individual tags will enable users to further filter and explore the collection by medium, period or style. Be sure to visit our website and check out the new collections page, which will be going live in the coming weeks!