Whitworth Art Gallery have confirmed that they will not be opening until Manchester early 2015.
The £15m revamp and expansion of the University of Manchester art gallery was due to be completed at the end of October but it has now been pushed back to February.
Maria Balshaw, the director of the Whitworth, says that renovating the historic building, completed in 1908, has taken longer than contractors estimated. “We could get everything done by the day before Christmas but there would be no point opening then,” adding that it would be better to get everything ready for a new opening date to the public on 14 February 2015.
The expansion of the gallery, which was founded in 1889, will provide around 400 sq. m of new exhibition space.
A new café, study centre and education rooms, as well as a wing overlooking the adjoining Whitworth Park in South Manchester and an “art garden”, will double the institution’s public space.
Building work began in 2012 after funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund among others was secured.
The artist Cornelia Parker is creating a new piece for the gallery’s reopening. She is working with the University of Manchester’s Nobel Prize-winning scientist Konstantin Novoselov to turn samples of pencil graphite, from the back of a work by William Blake in the Whitworth’s collection, into a graphene, a material stronger than steel that Novoselov and fellow Manchester-based, Russian-born Nobel prize winner Andre Geim first isolated in 2004.
