The largest gallery of modern and contemporary art in Australia, on the river at South Bank, with free general entry to the permanent collections and a children's art centre that is genuinely designed for children rather than tolerated.
GOMA is the anchor of the Queensland Cultural Centre and the largest gallery of modern and contemporary art in Australia. General entry to the permanent collections is free, which makes it the single best wet-weather insurance in Brisbane and one of the strongest arguments for building a day around South Bank.
The collection focuses on Australian, Asian and Pacific contemporary art — a deliberate regional emphasis that distinguishes it from the European-weighted collections of the southern capitals.
The building is designed for scale: large-format installation work that simply does not fit in older galleries sits comfortably here. That is what most visitors remember — room-sized pieces rather than framed canvases.
Alongside it sits the Australian Cinémathèque, the only dedicated cinema of its kind in an Australian art gallery, running film programmes tied to the exhibitions.
This is the part visiting families underestimate. The Children's Art Centre is not a corner with crayons — it commissions artists to create work specifically for children to interact with, and the installations change through the year.
It is free, it is inside the main building, and it holds children long enough that adults get to see the rest of the gallery. For a wet Brisbane afternoon with kids, there is nothing else in the city that competes.
The distinction matters for planning. General entry to GOMA and to the Queensland Art Gallery next door is free, always.
Major international touring exhibitions are ticketed separately, and the significant ones sell out — booking ahead is worth it if a specific exhibition is the reason you are coming. The Asia Pacific Triennial, the gallery's flagship recurring event, is a genuine fixture in the Australian art calendar.
GOMA opened in 2006 alongside the older Queensland Art Gallery, and the two operate as one institution across two buildings a short walk apart.
QAG holds the historical and Australian collections; GOMA holds the modern and contemporary. Seeing both takes half a day comfortably, and they sit within the same riverside precinct as the Queensland Museum and the State Library — four major institutions in a row, all free to enter.
There is a cafe and a restaurant on site, and the gallery shop is better than most. Cloaking is available for bags.
The building is fully accessible with lifts to every level, and wheelchairs are available. Photography rules vary by exhibition — the permanent collection is generally fine, touring shows often are not, and the signage tells you.
Weekday mornings are the quietest. School holidays and the opening weeks of a major exhibition are the busiest.
The Cultural Centre busway station is at the door, South Bank and South Brisbane train stations are a few minutes' walk, and the CityCat stops at South Bank — every journey 50 cents under Queensland's flat fare.
On foot from the CBD it is about ten minutes across Victoria Bridge or the Kurilpa Bridge.
GOMA was designed by Architectus and opened in December 2006, and the building is doing something specific: it is built for art that does not fit anywhere else.
The gallery holds around 4,500 square metres of exhibition space across multiple levels, with ceiling heights and floor loadings that allow genuinely large installation work — pieces that would be turned away by older institutions on physical grounds alone.
The long glazed elevation faces the river and the CBD, so the building borrows the city as a backdrop, and the interior daylight changes through the day. It won the national architecture award for public buildings, and it is worth ten minutes of looking at as a structure before you look at anything hanging in it.
It sits deliberately alongside the older Queensland Art Gallery, which opened in 1982, and the two now operate as a single institution called QAGOMA across two buildings a few minutes apart.
The regional focus is not decorative. QAGOMA has built one of the most significant collections of contemporary Asian and Pacific art anywhere, and that is a deliberate long-term position rather than a gap-filling exercise.
The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art — the APT — began in 1993 and was the first recurring exhibition in the world dedicated to contemporary art from Asia and the Pacific. It runs roughly every three years, commissions new work, and much of that work then enters the collection. A great deal of what you see on a normal visit arrived through an APT.
The Australian collection is strong on contemporary practice, and the Indigenous Australian holdings are substantial — including work from remote art centres in Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia.
Because the collection rotates and the building is built around temporary installation, there is no fixed set of famous works to tick off. That disappoints visitors expecting a permanent-collection gallery and rewards anyone willing to look at what is actually there.
This is the part that most changes a family's day, and it works differently from a children's area in most galleries.
QAGOMA commissions artists to create projects specifically for children — interactive works designed by the same practitioners whose work hangs upstairs, not activity tables bought from a catalogue. Projects change through the year and are frequently tied to the exhibition programme.
It is free, it is inside the main building, and it is designed for children to touch and use rather than observe. In practice it holds children long enough that adults get a proper look at the rest of the gallery, which is the actual test.
School holidays bring dedicated programming and considerably bigger crowds. A weekday morning in term time is the quiet version.
The Australian Cinémathèque on the ground floor is the only dedicated cinema of its kind in an Australian art gallery, and it is genuinely part of the institution rather than a screening room.
It runs curated programmes — retrospectives, national cinemas, experimental and artist film — often tied to what is showing in the galleries above. Sessions are frequently free with general entry, and the programme is published ahead.
For a rainy afternoon it is one of the better-value things in Brisbane, and almost no visitors know it exists.
Two hours covers GOMA properly. Half a day takes in QAG as well, and the two are a short walk apart through the Cultural Centre precinct.
Weekday mornings are quietest. The opening weeks of a major ticketed exhibition are the busiest, and those exhibitions genuinely do sell out — book ahead if a specific show is your reason for coming.
There is a cafe and a restaurant on site, cloaking for bags, and the shop is better than most gallery shops. Lifts reach every level and wheelchairs are available.
Photography rules vary: the permanent collection is generally fine, ticketed touring exhibitions frequently are not, and the signage at each entrance tells you. Large bags and umbrellas go in the cloakroom.
GOMA is one of four institutions in a single riverside row, and all four have free general entry.
The Queensland Art Gallery holds the historical and Australian collections. The Queensland Museum has the Muttaburrasaurus and the whale gallery, with the ticketed Sciencentre attached. The State Library of Queensland completes the row and has the best free quiet seating in the city, with river views and public wi-fi.
South Bank Parklands, Streets Beach and the riverside restaurants are immediately alongside. It is entirely reasonable to spend a full day here without paying for anything except lunch.
Cooee Tours acknowledges the Turrbal and Yuggera (Jagera) peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which Brisbane stands. We pay respect to Elders past, present and emerging.
South Bank and the Cultural Centre are on every Brisbane city day we run. Family owned and operating in South-East Queensland since 1974.
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