And not just any art - major, museum-worthy works by historical and contemporary Australian artists, some so dramatic they could dominate a room all by themselves.

That's life at Wesfarmers over in Perth, where the office walls are dotted with major artworks from a collection that has been three decades in the making.

But art doesn't belong in a boardroom on a permanent basis, which is why the company regularly lends its collection to other institutions, and stages exhibitions of its own.

Its latest show, Luminous World, has just opened at the National Library of Australia, with a collection of works by more than 50 artists that play with the concept of light.

Curator and manager of the collection Helen Carroll said the idea had been to select works that could sit in a dialogue with each other.

"A number of them are fairly large-scale - they're big, expansive, quite beautiful immersive works.

"It's lovely to be able to take them out of our offices and put them in a gallery where you've got the optimum lighting conditions and space around them," Ms Carroll said.

The earliest work in the show dates back to 1962, a cubist-style work by Godfrey Miller, while the most recent is a 2012 work by indigenous artist Mabel Juli.

"It's an extremely beautiful, very, very simple work on ochre, of one single star and the crescent of a moon, and it's kind of an unrequited love story," she said.

"It's very, very simple and very beautiful, and just says so much about the wonders of the universe and how we invest so much of our own personal and cultural mythology in our relationship with the stars."

The show includes photography by Rosemary Laing and Bill Henson, hollow poles from Arnhem Land, hard-edged abstraction and sculpture.

"If you're moving through the exhibition, you kind of move from night and deep space through to the radiance of the sun," Ms Carroll said.

"But it's not a slavish exhibition to a theme - these are all sort of touch points for people to consider the work and consider how light pervades our world and is absolutely intrinsic to the experience of the artist."

In town to launch the exhibition on Wednesday, artist Michael Leunig said contemporary art such as the works in the show had a different role to play nowadays. "When a lot of it was made it was perhaps challenging or confronting for some, it seemed incoherent to many and a lot of people didn't like it and were rejecting, and that's the nature of contemporary art," he said.

"But I have noticed that the world itself is what's becoming incoherent to many people, and the culture out there, the so-called normality, is becoming really peculiar and disturbing for people at an alarming rate." He said art now played a consoling role, rather than a destabilising one.

Luminous World - Contemporary art from the Wesfarmers Collection is showing at the National Library of Australia until June 29.