The quiet landscapes of a Canberra cultural giant

Posted on 24 September, 2026

There are few names woven as deeply into Canberra’s national cultural story as Andrew Sayers AM.

To many, he is remembered as the art historian, curator and museum leader whose career moved through some of the country’s most important institutions – the National Gallery of Australia, the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of Australia. But away from the public responsibilities of collections, exhibitions and institutions, Sayers was also quietly building a body of work of his own.

Until the end of October, a new Barton ArtBox exhibition brings Andrew’s private painting practice back to the city where he helped shape Australia’s cultural life.

Andrew Sayers, Scrivener Dam

The Capital and Beyond: The Landscapes of Andrew Sayers, presented by OFFMARKET Gallery in association with Canberra Art Biennial and Barton ArtBox, offers a rare chance to encounter that more private artistic life. On display until 31 October, the exhibition gathers an intimate selection of Andrew’s gouache landscapes from across the ACT, Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia and the Northern Territory.

For Canberra audiences, the exhibition carries a particular resonance as Andrew moved here in 1985 to take up a role at the NGA, where he became Curator of Australian Drawings and later Assistant Director (Collections). It was the beginning of a long professional association with the city and its national collecting institutions.

At the NGA, Andrew helped deepen public and scholarly understanding of Australian art, bringing the precision of a historian together with the eye of a curator. His writing also became the basis of major publications such as Drawing in Australia, Sidney Nolan: The Ned Kelly Story, Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century and Australian Art in the Oxford History of Art series.

Andrew Sayers Room with a View II

His contribution to Canberra expanded again in 1998, when he became the inaugural Director of the National Portrait Gallery. From modest beginnings, Andrew helped establish the Gallery as a centre for biography, history and ideas, championing portraiture not simply as likeness, but as a way of telling national stories.

In 2010, the same year he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for services to arts administration, Sayers became Director of the National Museum of Australia. There, he continued his work across national memory and cultural interpretation, overseeing major building works and helping shape exhibitions that spoke to Australian identity, history and place.

Yet the works in The Capital and Beyond invite viewers to consider Sayers from another angle: not only as an interpreter of Australian art, but as an artist responding directly to landscape. Rendered in gouache, the paintings trace a personal geography that begins in Canberra and moves outward to coastlines, mountains, plains and remote places that held his attention.

They are modest in scale but – reflecting the mind of someone who spent a lifetime thinking about how images carry meaning.

Barton ArtBox

Following his retirement from arts administration in 2013, Andrew devoted himself more fully to painting. He died in 2015, leaving behind a substantial body of works that has since been recognised through exhibitions in New South Wales, Melbourne, Perth and Canberra, and through representation in public collections including the National Gallery of Australia.

The exhibition was spearheaded by OFFMARKET Gallery director Olivier David who first met Andrew Sayers and his wife when they were living in Melbourne in 2012.

“I connected with his work immediately, there is a simplicity and quietness to his work, but at the same time they are incredibly powerful and evocative,” Olivier said.

“It is a real privilege for me to now present Andrew’s work and help share this more private side of his extraordinary creative life.

“Bringing this exhibition to Canberra feels particularly meaningful. This city was such an important part of Andrew’s life and career, and there is something very special for me about bringing his paintings back to a community that knew him and understood his contribution to Australian cultural life so well.”