Ben Quilty's show is full of raw, emotional portraits of Australian servicemen and women, their psychological and physical wounds almost fresh to the touch.
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Alex Seton's is filled with cool, almost serene marble carvings of folded flags, symbolising fallen soldiers.
But both artists want to show how war and death expose our humanity and help viewers remember that the deaths of soldiers in the Afghanistan conflict have far-reaching emotional impact.
Quilty's After Afghanistan and Seton's exhibition As Of Today... opened at the Australian War Memorial on Thursday, December 11.
As Australia's official war artist, Quilty went to Afghanistan in 2011, for a month that he says "changed my practice forever".
He worked with soldiers who had gone through unimaginable experiences, speaking to them about the realities of war and of death.
"As community we're not given that opportunity because they're really difficult questions to ask these people but having been there and having had that experience I'm very ready to ask them and then when they're sitting there in front of me, it's impossible for [those experiences] not to take over," he said.
The large, richly coloured portraits of soldiers are filled with human emotion and the physicality of each subject, some reclining as though asleep, others staring down directly into the viewer's eyes, and others hunched and twisted.
Quilty's triptych of clothed portraits of retired Air Commodore John Oddie show the range of brutal emotions that surfaced for the Air Force officer after he left the service.
Air Commodore Oddie said the experience was confronting, with Quilty drawing on emotional insights gained through conversation with himself and other former servicemen and women.
"I said to Ben, 'You've laid my life out like a three-course dinner and I have previously said I won't eat at that restaurant again,'" he said. "Because I just don't want to go back to that world that I was in there and I needed to find a pathway out of it."
The three portraits, painted eight months apart, show Air Commodore Oddie at his most emotionally burdened, and then in a reflective state and finally hopeful.
"These are not what I would call pretty paintings, they're not what I would have in my home. They're paintings that are useful for others to have and I don't want to define my life through them," he said.
Alex Seton's work is a room filled with 41 folded flags, each tied with a tassel and carved out of faint pink pearl marble. They symbolise the 41 Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan.
"This particular installation is about activating a space in which you have quiet contemplation and tribute to the fallen soldiers," he said.
Seton originally started the work by carving a flag every time he heard about another Australian death in Afghanistan, eventually getting up to 23 flags.
The Australian War Memorial then asked him to create another 18 flags to commemorate those all those who had died in Afghanistan.
"Outside of the circumstances, outside of the conflict, outside of the uniform, first and foremost these works are meant to activate a reminder of our humanity," he said.
