It will be a midsummer night’s dream for the newly-refurbished Leeds City Art Gallery as it prepares to re-open on the evening of Thursday 21 June 2007. An official civic reception will be hosted to celebrate the gallery's £1.5m rejuvenation, after which it will open its doors to the public once more from 10am the following day (22 June 2007). Art lovers will be delighted to learn that there will now be even more opportunities to visit the gallery as opening hours are also being extended- up to as late as 8pm in the first half of the week. The renovation programme has been funded by Leeds City Council and Yorkshire Forward, who donated £1.3m to the project. It has meant a raft of imaginative upgrading to the building and its display spaces, with a new exhibition area, lift for improved access, a café and shop.  | | The tiled Victorian Hall |
The main aim was to restore and make use of disused spaces and one of the most striking examples of this is the painstaking restoration and unveiling of the Victorian Tiled Hall. This awe-inspiring and beautiful room, which had been closed off and hidden behind library shelves for many years, forms a natural link between the Art Gallery and the adjacent Leeds Central Library. It is more than half a century since the public have seen the hall, where intricate, colourful Victorian tile work, marble columns and the oak, ebony and walnut parquet floor have been lovingly restored. Meanwhile, the Art Gallery itself is benefiting from a number of significant improvements, such as new oak flooring on most of the ground floor, extending into The Ziff Gallery. It is also being given a general sprucing-up of its décor. A new exhibition space has been created, which benefits from a sophisticated air management system. This will enable curators to bid for high-profile international touring exhibitions as well as allowing preparation and installation of new exhibits in a dedicated environment without impacting on the rest of the gallery. It promises to be a real fairytale opening event, given the theme of the first exhibition since Phase One of the refurbishment programme. 'Fairytale: Contemporary Art and Enchantment' features a modern-day take on traditional fairy tales by six international artists through paintings, still and moving photography, prints and sculpture. There is also an exhibition entitled Botany Bay, by Roger Palmer, featuring recurring motifs of canals, waterways, bridges and working vessels from all over the world, combined with new work created in Leeds. Once the official re-opening ceremony has taken place, Leeds City Art Gallery will be open to the public for longer, with new hours as follows:
Monday & Tuesday: 10am - 8pm
Wednesday: 12noon - 8pm
Thursday - Saturday: 10am-5pm
Sunday: 1pm-5pm. 'Fairytale: Contemporary Art and Enchantment' runs from Friday 22 June - Sunday 16 September 2007 | 
