The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, designed by Lab Architecture Studio, opened in 2002 and houses the gallery's Australian art collection.

With Melbourne's rapid growth came calls for the establishment of a public art gallery, and in 1859, the Government of Victoria pledged £2000 for the acquisition of plaster casts of sculpture.

These works were first displayed in December 1864 in the newly opened Picture Gallery, which remained under the curatorial administration of the Public Library until 1882.

[5][6] Grand designs for a building fronting Lonsdale and Swanston streets were drawn by Nicholas Chevalier in 1860 and Frederick Grosse in 1865, featuring an enormous and elaborate library and gallery, but these visions were never realised.

[10] Since the Felton Bequest, the gallery had long held plans to build a permanent facility; however, it was not until 1943 that the State Government chose a site, Wirth's Park, just south of the Yarra River.

In 1962, Roy Grounds split from his partners Frederick Romberg and Robin Boyd, retained the commission, and designed the gallery at 180 St Kilda Road (now known as NGV International).

The new bluestone clad building was completed in December 1967[13] and Victorian premier Henry Bolte officially opened it on 20 August 1968.

[21] The building is surrounded by a moat and fountains, while the main entrance features a famous water wall, which has been used to display the art of Keith Haring and others.

[27] The public space is being designed by architecture firms HASSELL and SO-IL with a new elevated garden connecting Hamer Hall and Southbank Boulevard.

[34] The NGV's Asian art collection began in 1862, one year after the gallery's founding, when Frederick Dalgety donated two Chinese plates.

[35] The 1880s saw the birth and development of the Heidelberg School (also known as Australian Impressionism) in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, and the NGV was well-placed to acquire some of the movement's key artworks, including Tom Roberts' Shearing the Rams (1890), Arthur Streeton's The purple noon's transparent might (1896), and Frederick McCubbin's The Pioneer (1904).

[36] The Australian collection includes works by Del Kathryn Barton, Charles Blackman, Clarice Beckett, Arthur Boyd, John Brack, Angela Brennan, Rupert Bunny, Louis Buvelot, Ethel Carrick, Nicholas Chevalier, Charles Conder, Olive Cotton, Grace Crowley David Davies, Destiny Deacon, William Dobell, Julie Dowling, Russell Drysdale, E. Phillips Fox, Rosalie Gascoigne, John Glover, Eugene von Guerard, Fiona Hall, Louise Hearman, Joy Hester, Hans Heysen, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, George W. Lambert, Sydney Long, John Longstaff, Frederick McCubbin, Helen Maudsley, Tracey Moffatt, Jan Nelson, Hilda Rix Nicholas, Sidney Nolan, John Perceval, Patricia Piccinini, Margaret Preston, Thea Proctor, Hugh Ramsay, David Rankin, Tom Roberts, John Russell, Grace Cossington Smith, Ethel Spowers, Arthur Streeton, Clara Southern, Jane Sutherland, Violet Teague, Jenny Watson, Fred Williams and others.

It has strong collections in areas as diverse as old masters, Greek vases, Egyptian artefacts and historical European ceramics, and contains the largest and most comprehensive range of artworks in Australia.

[38] The international collection includes works by Arbus, Bernini, Bonnard, Bordone, Canaletto, Cézanne, Constable, Correggio, Dalí, Degas, Delaunay, van Dyck, Emin, Gainsborough, Gentileschi, El Greco, Lange, Manet, Matisse, Memling, Modigliani, Monet, Moore, Munch, Picasso, Pissarro, Pittoni, Poussin, Rembrandt, Renoir, Ribera, Riley, Rothko, Rubens, Soulages, Tiepolo, Tintoretto, Titian, Turner, Uccello, Veronese and others.

[39] The NGV is also home to the only portrait of Lucrezia Borgia known to have been painted from life, dated to approximately 1515 and attributed to Dosso Dossi.

[40] Selected works In 1967, the NGV established the first curatorial department dedicated to photography in an Australian public gallery,[41] one of the first in the world.

In May 1883, when the National Gallery of Victoria opened on a Sunday for the first time, a public debate erupted over the propriety of displaying a female nude portrait on the Sabbath.

The painting in question, French artist Jules Joseph Lefebvre's Chloé (1875), had been loaned to the gallery that month, and was "cautiously displayed in a dim corner".

It eventually found a permanent home at Melbourne's Young and Jackson Hotel, down the road from the NGV on Swanston Street.

[52] Durrant later stated that it was part of a performance art piece intended to shock those who might be horrified by the death of the animal while also happy to consume meat.

[55] During a retrospective of Andres Serrano's work at the NGV in 1997, the then Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, George Pell, sought an injunction from the Supreme Court of Victoria to restrain the gallery from publicly displaying Piss Christ, which was not granted.

[58] Reflecting the influence of abstract art, particularly New York-inspired hard edge and color field painting, it featured 74 works by forty (mostly emerging young) Australian painters and sculptors.

Described as a radical departure from the gallery's more traditional program, it signified more broadly a growing internationalisation of the Australian art world.

[82] A decade after the original exhibition, a second edition of Melbourne Now ran from 24 March 2023 to 20 August 2023 at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia.

[84] The inaugural Triennial ran from 15 December 2017 to 15 April 2018, and drew almost 1.3 million visitors during its run, making it the most attended exhibition in the gallery's history until then.