How well do you know who you are, and is who you think you are, the way other people see you? In an opportunity to gain some understanding of how Australians have been seen throughout history, the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) has opened the doors to its newest exhibition.
Who Are You: Australian Portraiture features 130 works, combining collections from both the NPG and the National Gallery of Victoria, and is on display until 29 January 2023. Attendees are encouraged to reflect on the title question as they walk through the five distinct sections of Australian portraits on show.
Images on display speak to the connection between people and place, highlighting the relationship between artists, their subjects, and the environment. Next, attendees witness the evolution of portraiture from paintings to high-quality photographs. Ideas of community, what it means to be included, and how it feels to be isolated are explored. Then we move on to deep concepts that capture the intimate workings of the minds of the artists and sitters. Finally, we explore our leaders and icons, and the narrative we have constructed for them.
Telling our story both as individuals and as a collective using photography and portraiture enables viewers to connect with the works easily without much explanation. Co-curator Joanna Gilmour of the NPG believes, arguably, that portraiture is a more accessible genre as it is all about people and what it means to be human.
“We’re hard-wired to connect with and be curious about other people, and portraits seem to tap into this in each of us. They enable us to connect with other lives, no matter how remote or distant, temporally, socially, or geographically those lives might be from our own,” Gilmour says.
Travel through different countries and time periods and you will see how art and portraiture differ; what is beautiful somewhere may be overlooked somewhere else. Gilmour says Australian portraiture is unique in the way it encompasses identities and experiences that are as diverse and multifaceted as the country itself. We are home to one of the world’s oldest living cultures and are continuously taking in people from cultures across the globe while sharing a sense of belonging.
“The exhibition shows that Australian artists have always found ways of telling diverse and powerful stories by reinventing and reconfiguring the languages and codes of a genre that is often thought to be staid and traditional,” Gilmour says.
Discover who we are at the National Portrait Gallery until 29 January; portrait.gov.au
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