Sydney will showcase some of the world's first abstract artworks as part of a blockbuster exhibition program expected to lure nearly 30,000 enthusiasts through gallery doors.
Seminal works by three of the behemoths of the art world will grace the harbour city during the biggest-ever Sydney International Art Series.
Arts Minister Ben Franklin says the line up, "reaffirms Sydney as Australia's cultural capital and a global hub for the arts".
Pioneering artist Wassily Kandinsky will be first out the gate when the Art Gallery of NSW imports a collection of his works from New York's Guggenheim Museum in November.
The Russian art theorist is credited as being the world's first abstract artist.
His works, characterised by bright colours, pictographic shapes and sharp edges, remain a staple of art history curricula, Nazi-looted art collections and Sydney's summer art showcase.
The Art Gallery of NSW's acclaimed new $344 million building means the gallery has the capacity to host two Sydney International Art Series exhibitions for the first time.
Sculptures by surrealist Louise Bourgeois will haunt the gallery's Sydney Modern building from November 25.
Her looming bronze works will lurk in the gallery's cavernous exhibition space, the Tank, while monographs and other art will be displayed upstairs.
Gallery director Michael Brand says the space will provide "an extraordinary opportunity to dramatise the tensions, the contradictions, the powerful psychological oppositions, that drove Bourgeois's art and formed its content".
Meanwhile, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia will host works by multimedia master Tacita Dean in December.
Dean's monumental chalk drawings will be flanked by her video art, photos, and even the set and costume designs she created for a ballet based on Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy.
MCA director Suzanne Cotter described Dean's works as "powerful and deeply human".
"Tacita Dean is undoubtedly one of today's greatest living artists and truly an artist of our time," she said on Tuesday.
The Sydney International Art Series was introduced in 2010 as a partnership between the NSW government's tourism and events agency Destination NSW, the MCA and the Art Gallery of NSW to bring international art to the harbour city.
