From colonial times, the Blue Mountains have been a magnet for artists, writers and, more recently, filmmakers. Painters were among the first non-indigenous visitors to the high plateau: they marvelled at the wide valleys, dramatic sandstone cliffs and eucalyptus-tinged air and hastened to record the pristine views for a population eager to see the formerly impenetrable mountains and points west. The area's popularity with visual artists, the late Adam Cullen among them, has never waned.

A public art gallery in the area, then, seems overdue. Some 14 years ago, when the idea for a gallery in the Blue Mountains was first mooted, it seemed a grand vision but also a remote one. Then the state government donated the land and the local government put out a tender, resulting in a pioneering public-private funding deal with supermarket giant Coles, signed in 2005, which bore the costs of the construction. The $49.5 million Blue Mountains Cultural Centre, which includes the Blue Mountains City Art Gallery, has its official opening this weekend.

Sitting on the peak of Katoomba Street, beside the historic Carrington Hotel, the eco-friendly Blue Mountains Cultural Centre is a graceful U-shaped building, with dazzling views over the Jamison Valley from the central courtyard, the viewing platform and many of the interior spaces. The centre consists of the 600sq m gallery, a library and a hi-tech heritage centre, all of which share the top level, while the new Coles supermarket and a car park are spread over three levels below.

Some locals were initially concerned about the cohabitation of a supermarket and gallery. But the centre's director, Paul Brinkman, says the centre is a building on top of a building. "There are really no shared facilities other than the elevator that takes us up from the ground floor," he says. "It's quite unique, even down to different architects. There was a relationship (between Coles and the centre) during construction. It was a practical solution and, in these financially straitened times, the only solution."

Expectations are high that the cultural centre will bring a much-needed boost in visitors to the area. "The hope is to enliven Katoomba," says Brinkman. "We are going to be one of the largest, if not the largest regional gallery and cultural centre in NSW. We wanted to stamp our place as a regional cultural hub: there are so many artists who live up here, it's so long overdue."

GALLERY: Picturing the Great Divide

Fittingly, the gallery's first exhibition - Picturing the Great Divide: Visions from Australia's Blue Mountains - features works from 60 artists that span 200 years. It is a survey of changing and evolving landscape perceptions inspired by the sheer physicality of the area. The paintings, prints, sculptures and other objects were borrowed from galleries and collections around the country, including 24 from the Art Gallery of NSW. Brinkman says the new gallery will begin amassing a permanent collection from scratch as soon as possible.

The works in the show - by artists such as Anne Zahalka, Rosemary Laing, Adam Cullen, Euan Macleod and Brett Whiteley - highlight how even the most urban of contemporary artists appreciate the freedom of working away from city hustle and lights, or revisiting or re-evaluating significant landscapes. Mountain locals represented include watercolourists, potters and glassmakers: Robert Malherbe, Lucy Culliton, Julie Harris, John Caldwell, Peter Rushforth and Keith Rowe. "I wanted to incorporate the historic and the contemporary, to weave them together to make a narrative that would resonate," curator Gavin Wilson says.

The earliest works are by French draftsman Alphonse Pellion, made in 1819, which spent many years languishing in Alan Bond's storeroom and have never been exhibited.

The landscapes of Conrad Martens and Eugene von Guerard reflected ideas of the sublime and a sense of wonder at nature popular at the time. Those artists loved depicting the vertiginous landscape and labyrinthine valleys. "The artists were blessed with these extraordinary views, and they were able to take you into these spaces to present a new world of promise," Wilson says.

One of the centrepieces of the Blue Mountains show is von Guerard's Govett's Leap and Grose River Valley, Blue Mountains, New South Wales, 1873. "There was that sense of the sublime coming through," Wilson says, "but while all this was going on, the intentions of the poor indigenous nations had been overlooked. They weren't interested in depictions of the sublime. The Dharug and Gundungurra (people) had been in and out of that country for thousands of years ... in fact there's a very telling lithograph that von Guerard did where he has two tiny figures in the middle ground on a precipice, these two tiny black figures, they are so diminished they are giving way to development."

Then came the Edwardians and a sudden burst of photography. "They were very keen, they loved to get out among the elements, and Harry Phillips (1873-1944) almost invented the Blue Mountains as a tourist attraction."

During his research Wilson came across two photographs by Phillips that seem worlds apart though were separated only by 10 years. "One has a horse-drawn buggy, with two figures inside and two figures with rifles walking in front of the buggy, taken in 1910 on the road to Mount Victoria. What are they looking for? Bushrangers? Snakes? Ten years later there's a jaunty party of motorists going to Mount Irvine," he says. The adventure may have tamed, but the attraction to views and vistas remained.

Painters and photographers never depict a landscape objectively: the images come loaded with all the cultural baggage of the artist's life and times. Artists such as Margaret Preston and Fred Williams, in the way they approach the region, were on their way to abstraction. So too do contemporary artists interpret the Blue Mountains in a quite different manner: they no longer merely admire the picturesque and the sublime - with occasional exceptions such as Andrew Merry's 2011 epic and romantic photograph Valley of the Grose - although the mountains, ridges and valleys still have a strong hold on their imaginations.

Macleod's fascination with the underworld took him to Jenolan Caves and Laing set bloody brides afloat over the Jamison Valley in her Bulletproof Glass series. "It's quite a frank statement on the loss of innocence," Wilson says.

Archibald Prize-winner Cullen, renowned for his punk ethos and provocative portraits of criminals and bloodied kangaroos, lived in the Blue Mountains on and off for 20 years until his death in July. He made some of his first figures in landscape around Glenbrook in 1991. One of Cullen's final pieces is on show in the new exhibition, referencing mystical and feral animals. "He was fascinated by the Aboriginal myth of the yowie. He did a series of sculptures: a wild dog, a boar, a bunyip and a yowie. They're quite brilliant and sad in a way," Wilson says.

Cullen had been looking forward to seeing his work in the context of many others in the new gallery: "That has been the case with many of the contemporary artists. Before you know where you are going you need to know where you've been," Wilson says.