The gift of giving — Eva and Marc Besen’s extraordinary legacy finds its forever home
Back-of-house comes to the fore at TarraWarra Museum of Art’s brand new KTA-designed multi-purpose education centre and storage space.
Image credit: The Eva and Marc Besen Centre, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, VIC. Photo: Leo Showell
Award-winning architect Kerstin Thompson was aware that there was already “quite a bit of architectural legacy” to contend with at TarraWarra Museum of Modern Art when she started work on The Eva and Marc Besen Centre, the Yarra Valley museum’s new companion building which opens to the public on 4 March, 2025.
Image credit: The Eva and Marc Besen Centre, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, VIC. Photo: Leo Showell
“I was thinking, how do you add another piece, another potential bit of legacy? We didn’t want to end up with tensions between all these pieces,” Kerstin Thompson tells me. “So to make them hang together as an ensemble that's complementary, we thought, don't try and compete with the original which has that beautiful mass of rammed earth walls. They talk to each other, they've both got their integrity and qualities, but in very different ways. We thought perhaps our building would have a feeling of lightness, delicacy and subtlety.”
Indeed, it does. The centre sits in harmony and deference to Alan Powell’s building (which opened in 2003), tucked behind it and snuggling into its original arc. But much like Thompson’s award-winning Bundanon Art Museum, the new centre is built into the side of a hill. The subterranean nature means the building has one facade, which is demure, almost hidden behind a mesh veil, while the rest of the building embeds itself within the belly of the landscape. The museum and the new centre are zipped together by a sculpture path designed by Clare Martin of Oculus and Wurundjeri horticulturist and artist Craig Murphy-Wandin, with native bushland punctuated by works by Clement Meadmore, Lenton Parr and Robert Klippel.
Image credit: Inventi Ensemble at The Eva and Marc Besen Centre, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, VIC. Photo: Leo Showell
While the new building has been designed as a multipurpose education, exhibition and performance space, it is, most arrestingly, the permanent home of the late Eva and Marc’s extensive and historic private collection of over 300 pieces of contemporary Australian art.
“Architecturally, relative to the museum, the new centre maintains its back of “houseness”. It's the quieter building,” Thompson says, with characteristic humility (Thompson won the Royal Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 2023). “But on the other hand, it's got this incredible collection, that is a major draw card and an attraction. So, it's about enabling more people to enjoy that significant collection of the Besens.”
Image credit: The Eva and Marc Besen Centre, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, VIC. Photo: James Henry
The collection is behind a 46-metre-long secure glass wall on a row of 64 towering storage racks. Sixteen racks are double-sided, designed to be pulled out permanently, lit up, and used to display works that rotate every six months.
And while the remaining racks are ostensibly storage, and not an exhibition in themselves, when we look through them I can see that it’s been hard for the museum’s director, Dr Victoria Lynn, to stymie her curatorial impulses. As she pulls out the racks I see how she’s been unable to stop herself from making sense of each one. John Olsen's dazzlingly bright Salute to Cerberus sits beneath his dark and torpid Man Obsessed with the Sun (both from the mid-1960s). Bill Henson and Louise Hearman, together in life, hang together a few racks along. On another, Callum Morton’s 2012 painting Cover Up #7 finds a home next to Pauses (Interchronic), a 1976 painting by his mentor, Howard Arkley. As she pulls out more racks to show what the new permanent collection holds, she reveals a cornucopia of works by the most important Australian artists from the 1930s until now — Jefferey Smart, Fred Williams, Tim Storrier, through to Patricia Piccinini and Rosalie Gascoigne. It’s a remarkable collection and an astonishing act of philanthropy — the entire TarraWarra collection comprises over 600 works gifted to the Australian public (the museum is a not-for-profit public institution).
The late Marc and Eva Besen began collecting art shortly after they married in 1954. Inspired by the European art they saw on their honeymoon, the couple returned to Australia driven to collect the art, and support the artists of their time. This saw them acquire the early works of significant Australian painters like Fred Williams, Clifton Pugh and John Olsen, and led to lifelong friendships. The gift of their collection began in 1999 with the establishment of the museum; after the couple’s passing — Eva in 2021 and Marc two years later in 2023 — their extensive collection of a further 300 works was gifted to the museum, culminating with the establishment of the centre as the final resting place for their collection.
The centre opens with a flurry of activities, including a mask-making workshop inspired by Kate Beynon’s Masks of the Ogre Dancers — a hallucinatory painting based on a tale of two characters who straddle the space between life and death — in the new education centre.
“Education was one of Mark Besen‘s passions and a driving force behind the establishment of the new centre,” Lyn says. “We saw the centre as a place for the next generation of art enthusiasts and art makers. He was so passionate that people would come to understand modern contemporary art.”
