National Gallery Victoria
Continuing our ongoing relationship with the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Higgins recently completed building and painting works for their latest special exhibition ‘A Golden Age of China – Qianlong Emperor’. The first part of the project involved demolition of the completed Jean Paul Gautier exhibition, which itself took 3 weeks to build and only 2 days to demolish using 6 men.
For the current Qianlong exhibition, we constructed and supplied special display cabinets to house Chinese artwork glazing. Cabinets varied in size with some being as large as 12m wide x 6m high x 0.5m deep. Other MDF cases to hold artwork had to be built and painted off site, with some constructed in 4 pieces to create a whole case being 4m high x 3m wide.
All works were completed within 3 weeks using a team of 6 carpenters, 4 painters, 3 plasters and 1 Project Manager all on site full-time, often 15 hours, 6 days a week. Our Project/Site Manager coordinated all trades, liaising and meeting daily with designers, project managers and overseeing other trades provided by NGV for the project.
The end product is a beautiful space that showcases truly impressive and lavish works including paintings, robes, objet d’art and ceremonial weapons.
The following video showcases an interesting way of seeing how Higgins operate during the demolition of the exhibition 'A Golden Age of China- Qianlong Emperor’ and the exhibition construction of 'Masterpieces From The Hermitage- The Legacy of Catherine The Great.'
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