Some of Australia's most well-known sports stars and creative achievers will be exposed in the National Portrait Gallery's latest exhibition Bare: Degrees of Undress.
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The show pieces together more than 100 photographs, paintings and prints from the gallery's collection to allow the audience to see the works in a whole new way, revealing themes of physical prowess, identity, humanity, liberation and intimacy.
While portraits of Dame Edna Everage, Germaine Greer, Megan Gale and Elle Macpherson will be among the exhibition, the majority are men with their shirts off, curator Penelope Grist said, such as NRL player Billy Slater.
When piecing together pieces from the collection showing the subjects in various states of undress, Ms Grist found men dominated.
The only exposed female breast is in a photo of Norman Lindsay's inner circle showing the bohemian scene of the 1890s which the gallery rarely displays.
"It was in no way deliberate, we didn't have a 'no boobs' rule," Ms Grist said.
"The history of art is very much focused on painted female nudes and that is where that expectation comes from, but portraiture is a very different thing, it's a very public thing by its nature."
Ms Grist said public portraiture was different from the idea of celebrity nudity which was typically female dominated.
"Celebrity culture is all about it being a great career move to have a nude photo shoot," she said.
"It shows how distant from celebrity culture the collection is in some respects."
While nakedness can be seen as raw and accident and nudity planned and designed, varying degrees of bareness in portraiture reveals something about the subject's identity and society, Ms Grist said.
"The decision to uncover part, or all, of the body in a portrait is at least as significant as a choice of clothing," she said.
As part of the "fun" exhibition, Ms Grist has created an online game allowing visitors to discover their own nude alter-ego from art history.
"The aim is to be the most fun art history lesson you'll ever get," she said.
"You answer a series of questions by choosing between different portraits in the show … you might find you're the Venus De Milo, or Botticelli's Venus or a heroic Greek nude, it's a little way of finding out your own relationship with art history."
To coincide with Bare, the gallery has teamed up with Canberra's Youth Theatre for a production titled Skin which will investigate identity through bareness within the exhibition space.
Bare opens Friday August 14 until 15 November 2015 and entry is free.
