“As we are now building on the success of the Sydney Modern transformation, it feels like the right time to transition to a new generation of leadership for the next exciting chapter in the history of our 153-year-old art museum,” he announced to senior staff.
Brand’s reign has had its low points: a landmark commission by Jonathan Jones in the grounds of the new building is still not open to the public. The gallery has denied a falling-out between the two men.
Brand struggled to convince his political masters to double the operating spending for a gallery now with twice the number of exhibition spaces.
The gallery was forced to cut the equivalent of 30 full-time positions to patch an $8 million shortfall in forecast commercial revenues. The budget for the state’s arts sector is not expected to improve anytime soon.
Inside the gallery, Brand and deputy director Maud Page have given agency to talented curators such as Justin Paton, Nicholas Chambers, Wayne Tunnicliffe and Denise Mimmochi.
Through such energy, the gallery scored a major coup, bringing Magritte to Sydney in the centenary year of the art movement surrealism, as a groundbreaking show on that very subject is packing out the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Nicholas Chambers curated the timely Magritte exhibition. Credit: Edwina Pickles
Much-lauded retrospectives of Lesley Dumbrell, Louise Bourgeois and Hilma af Klint have positioned the gallery at the forefront of a worldwide reappraisal of women’s contemporary art.
But the gallery has been criticised for failing to champion and showcase mid-to-late career Sydney artists, including the likes of Cressida Campbell, whose overdue retrospective in 2022 brought bumper crowds to the National Gallery of Australia.
Brand’s first curatorial intervention in 2013, America: Painting a Nation, was met with a lukewarm reception from some critics and in the early days of his tenure, he got off-side with some staff and volunteers.
Popular, high-profile managers were made redundant under a painful restructure described in Judith White’s book Culture Heist. White, the former head of the volunteer group Art Gallery Society, left that organisation in 2015.
More recently, tabloids picked over Brand’s expense claims for restaurants and alcohol which the art gallery insists was the legitimate cost of private fund-raising.
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Pundits have been predicting Brand would quit almost from the beginning, but speculation increased recently as he spent time overseas cultivating connections with other world-leading institutions.
In Brand’s absence, the popular and impressive Page runs the gallery, and that experience makes her an early favourite to take the helm.