National Gallery of Victoria

Why it matters

The NGV acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people as the Traditional Owners of the land on which it is built. Founded in 1861, it calls itself the country's oldest and most visited gallery, and its collection now holds more than 75,000 works of First Nations, Australian and international art and design.

For its first century it shared a site with the State Library on Swanston Street. Its own building, on St Kilda Road south of the river, was designed by Roy Grounds as the first stage of the Arts Centre, begun in 1962 and opened on 20 August 1968. Its first exhibition, The Field, 74 works by 40 artists, opened the next day to what the NGV itself calls much controversy.

The Victorian Heritage Database, which lists it as H1499, calls it the state's first major purpose-built art gallery: a bluestone block behind moats, with Grounds's water wall at the entrance and Leonard French's stained-glass ceiling over the Great Hall. The record adds something unusual for a building: that visitors' own experience of the water wall and the ceiling is part of why it matters. The building was redeveloped between 1999 and 2003, and the water wall was moved and reconfigured in that work.

When Federation Square opened in 2002, the Australian collection moved there, to The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, which the City of Melbourne describes as the first major gallery in the world given over entirely to Australian art. It shows almost 25,000 works, including a suite of galleries of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art. St Kilda Road kept the name NGV International and the art of Europe, Asia, the Americas and the Pacific.

Today the two sites draw crowds on a world scale. The Art Newspaper's annual survey counted 3,061,799 visitors across both in 2025, and placed NGV International, with 2,495,189, at 25th among the world's art museums. A third site is on the way: THE FOX: NGV Contemporary, on Southbank Boulevard, which the NGV says will open in 2028.

The theft of the Weeping Woman

The gallery's best-known story is a crime. In August 1986, the same year the NGV bought Picasso's Weeping Woman of 1937, the painting was taken from the St Kilda Road building. A group calling itself the Australian Cultural Terrorists demanded a $25,000 art prize for young Australians and a ten per cent rise in arts funding. Seventeen days later the painting was found in a locker at Spencer Street Station. The theft has never been solved. The painting is listed today in the NGV's Level 2 gallery of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century art.

What it's like

Coming from Flinders Street, you cross Princes Bridge and walk past the Arts Centre; the gallery is the long, low bluestone wall beyond it, set behind its moat. The entrance is through a sheet of glass with water running down it. Touching it, the ABC found when the building turned fifty, is a ritual for many Melburnians, and children, one local listing says, love to run their fingers through it.

Inside are gallery after gallery on floor after floor: Asian art on the first, European painting on the second, with Tiepolo's Banquet of Cleopatra, a canvas three and a half metres wide, among its centrepieces. Lonely Planet advises a couple of hours for the collection alone. Beyond the entrance is the Great Hall, a carpeted room under Leonard French's ceiling, which is nearly 61 metres long.

Part of the answer is in how the glass was made. French split thick slabs of French and Belgian glass into shape with an anvil and a hammer, and the faceted pieces, as Jenny Brown described them for Domain, bounce and refract the coloured light. He called it "using glasswork to paint with light". His daughter Lisa told the ABC what he was after: "You lie on the grass and you look through the trees and you get that magical, dappled light." French said, too, that viewers can make out hidden mosaics in the patterns. Janet Horn, who told the ABC she had been visiting for fifty years, has the last word: "Lying down is okay, but getting up is the problem."

The Ian Potter Centre is a different visit: part of Fed Square, entered from the square or from Russell Street, with floors of Australian art that run from the First Nations galleries to Tom Roberts's Shearing the Rams of 1890.

What to see there

Most of the NGV is free, and the first choice is which building to go to. A ticketed exhibition, a tour or the children's programme can then be added to either.

NGV International

The international collection fills most of the building. The NGV places Tiepolo's The Banquet of Cleopatra of 1743–44, bought in 1933 with the Felton Bequest, in its gallery of seventeenth and eighteenth-century European painting on Level 2, and Picasso's Weeping Woman in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century gallery on the same floor. Time Out's list of works every Melburnian should see adds Pissarro's Boulevard Montmartre, Morning, Cloudy Weather of 1897, the first Impressionist painting the gallery bought, in 1907, and Mary Beale's Portrait of a Lady, by one of the first professional women painters of her time. Lonely Planet notes that Asian art fills more than half of the first level. Until 8 November 2026, Art of the Pacific shows the gallery's Pacific collection, free.

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia

Across the river at Fed Square, the Australian collection runs from the First Nations galleries, where Wurrdha Marra shows the NGV's First Nations collection, free and ongoing, through colonial painting to the present. The Heidelberg School is the draw for many: Tom Roberts's Shearing the Rams hangs in Gallery 6 on Level 2, the NGV's collection record says. Two free exhibitions run alongside: Plant Life: The Nature of Design, until 7 February 2027, and Passage: The Art of Atong Atem, from 30 October 2026 to 14 June 2027.

A ticketed exhibition

The big temporary shows are where the NGV charges. Until 31 January 2027 the Ian Potter Centre's Level 3 holds a retrospective of Margaret Preston, the modernist known for her flowers and woodblock prints, which also sets out the debate over her use of First Nations designs. Tickets cost $35 for adults, $17 for children aged 5 to 15 and $82 for a family of two adults and three children; seniors' concession is $33, on Wednesdays only.

A free highlights tour

Both sites run a free collection highlights tour at 11am. At NGV International no booking is needed; at the Ian Potter Centre the NGV warns that numbers are limited. Lonely Planet gives the tour as about 50 minutes. The NGV's current listings run to mid-December, so check its tours page for dates after that.

The NGV Triennial, from 13 December 2026

The NGV Triennial is a free survey of new art and design at NGV International. The 2026 edition runs from 13 December 2026 to 11 April 2027 with nearly 100 artists and designers from 35 countries, and it is free. The first, in 2017, drew more than 1.23 million visitors, Creative Victoria says, so expect crowds in the summer holidays and come early on a weekday.

With children

The NGV runs exhibitions made for children. During the Triennial it is Squish, Twist, Fizz: Mika Rottenberg for Kids at NGV International, free, from 13 December 2026 to 11 April 2027. For younger children the gallery is easiest in short stretches: the water wall at the door, a lie-down under the Great Hall's ceiling, then one or two rooms.

How to visit

Getting there

Both sites are a short walk from Flinders Street station. For NGV International, 180 St Kilda Road, cross Princes Bridge past the Arts Centre, about 500 metres, or take any tram one stop south: routes 1, 3, 5, 6, 16, 64, 67 and 72 all stop at the Arts Precinct stop outside the door, which is step-free.

The Ian Potter Centre, on the corner of Flinders and Russell Streets, is about 250 metres from the station through Fed Square; the same trams stop at Federation Square on Swanston Street, and routes 35, 70 and 75 along Flinders Street. The two buildings are about ten minutes' walk apart across the river. Public transport fares are half price until 1 January 2027; our guide to getting around Melbourne explains them.

For anyone without the map: Flinders Street station stands on the north bank of the Yarra at the foot of Swanston Street. Fed Square, with The Ian Potter Centre at its eastern corner on Russell Street, is across Flinders Street from the station. NGV International is south of the river, on the east side of St Kilda Road, just beyond the Arts Centre.

Driving is the harder option. There is paid parking at Arts Centre Melbourne, with a lift to the NGV International entrance, and at the Fed Square car park off Russell Street or Batman Avenue, which has a 2.1-metre height limit. The NGV says building works nearby may affect access.

Hours, tickets and the rules inside

Both sites are open every day from 10am to 5pm, from 1pm on Anzac Day, and closed on Christmas Day. Entry to the collections is free; tickets are needed only for some exhibitions, and both sites take cards and contactless payment only. Backpacks, large bags and umbrellas must be left at the cloakroom, which is free. Photography is allowed in most areas, but not with flash, tripods or selfie sticks; some exhibitions forbid it, so watch the signs.

Food

There is no need to leave to eat. NGV International has three places, all open daily, and Fed Square has one.

Access and children

Both buildings are step-free from the street, and wheelchairs can be borrowed free at either information desk, best booked ahead on (03) 8620 2222. The details differ between the two sites.

The NGV's pages do not say whether pushchairs are allowed inside exhibitions, so ask at the desk; the lifts reach every floor at both sites. The collections are free for everyone; Margaret Preston's child ticket is $17.

Making the most of it

Nearby

NGV International sits in the arts precinct of Southbank, beside the Arts Centre and Hamer Hall. Walk south down St Kilda Road and you reach Kings Domain, with the Shrine of Remembrance and the Royal Botanic Gardens, a good pairing for a day. From the Ian Potter Centre, cross Flinders Street into the city's laneways and arcades. The Melbourne guide shows how the city fits together.