If Sydney Modern is now the standard for institutional galleries in Australia, it has set a very high bar indeed.
The $344 million building on the harbour is finally complete, filled with big-ticket artworks, and will open to the public on Saturday.
More than 15,000 people have already registered to visit on the opening weekend alone.
"Make no mistake, this is the most significant cultural build since the Opera House," NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet said at a preview on Tuesday.
With Sydney Modern, NSW has the best art gallery not just in Australia, but the world, the premier said.
It's high-flown rhetoric, but the new building is what any institution would hope for: it is welcoming, inspiring, and challenging.
It was designed by Japanese architects SANAA as a series of limestone-clad pavilions topped with thin roofs, and walls of glass looking out onto Sydney Harbour.
The building almost doubles the AGNSW's exhibition space and brings Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art to the forefront.
Visitors first encounter the relocated Yiribana Gallery of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, followed by galleries dedicated to contemporary art and then space for major temporary exhibitions.
A central aim was to integrate the architecture and waterfront landscape with the artworks, and the site throws up some fascinating juxtapositions.
For example, a joyous polka-dotted flower sculpture by Tokyo-based Yayoi Kusama is visible from the gallery entrance, but can be viewed from a different angle with defence ships between its brightly coloured stems.
It's one of nine commissions with leading Australian and international artists specifically for the site, part of the largest commissioning program in the art gallery's 151-year history.
In, all there are works by more than 900 artists from Australia and around the world across the new campus.
One of the most delightful temporary shows is called Dreamhome: Stories of Art and Shelter, which features the work of 29 artists around the notion of home.
A cardboard city grows from the ceiling like stalactites, and an imaginary apartment block constructed from lurid pink scaffolding is home to dozens of bizarre sculptural creatures.
There's also a purpose-built gallery for time-based art, featuring Howie Tsui's Retainers of anarchy, an algorithmic video work installed on a 26m screen.
The exhibition spaces are linked by light-filled atriums and monumental limestone walls, across levels that gradually step down to the water.
A sense of lightness characterises the design throughout, yet it all sits on the underground Tank space, a decommissioned World War I fuel bunker and place of echoes and darkness.
With 125 seven metre high columns, it's the largest space in the entire museum and the antithesis of the galleries above.
The inaugural Tank commission is a series of sculptures titled The End of Imagination, by Adrian Villar Rojas.
His five monumental works embody the eeriness of the space, which is lit only by roving lights and at times is in almost complete darkness.
The Villar Rojas commission will be in place until mid-2023, after which it's expected to attract more big names in the global art world.
The Tank will come to rival the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall and the Guggenheim in New York, according to NSW Arts Minister Ben Franklin.
An opening program during the first two weeks of December will include a free concert in the Domain, artist talks and workshops, and a nightly drone show by artist Reko Rennie.
The development has been funded by the NSW Government and more than $100m in private donations.
Sydney Modern is open from December 3.
AAP travelled with the assistance of AGNSW.
