Billionaire trucking magnates Lindsay and Paula Fox have made a record $100 million donation towards The National Gallery of Victoria, and secured naming rights on the gallery's new building in the process.
It is the largest cash donation ever made to an Australian art museum by a living donor.
The new building will be named The Fox: NGV Contemporary.
The Victorian government on Tuesday said it hoped the move would encourage "further philanthropic support for the project", with the donation building on the existing $20 million donated by the Ian Potter Foundation in 2020.
To put the donation into perspective, Forbes estimates Mr Fox’s net worth as $2.9 billion.
The Fox family is behind Australia's biggest private logistics company Linfox, which has more than 5,000 trucks across 10 countries in the Asia-Pacific.
The new gallery will be built in the Melbourne Arts Precinct at Southbank.
Minister for Creative Industries Danny Pearson said the donation was an "extraordinary gift to the people of Victoria."
"Philanthropy can transform cities and NGV Contemporary will be a true game-changer," he said.
The new gallery forms part of the $1.7 billion redevelopment of the Southbank precinct, the Melbourne Arts Precinct Transformation, which also includes upgrades to the Arts Centre Melbourne, as well as Arts Centre Melbourne's new Centre for Creativity.
The planned precinct will showcase art, design and fashion as well as national and international architecture, and will feature an 18,000 square metre public space.
It has been labelled as Melbourne's answer to the Eiffel Tower.
Ms Fox, who is also an NGV board member, said the gift was "the culmination of many years of passionate support" for the gallery.
"We hope that our donation will inspire others in supporting this program to make this an icon for the future," she said in a statement.
The new site in Southbank is expected to be finished in 2028.
The arts industry was particularly heavily impacted by COVID-19 restrictions that saw thousands of artists and performers thrown out of work as shows and galleries closed.
Melbourne was also the city to spend the most amount of time in lockdown in the world. The typically thriving arts and food capital spent more than 245 days in lockdown, across six separate periods.
