Pupils are likely to dilate and minds bend at In the flesh, the latest show at the National Portrait Gallery that explores what it means to be human.

It's an immersive encounter with a range of artworks by 10 contemporary Australian artists, including sculpture, large-scale drawings and hyper-realistic paintings.

Many of the works provoke instant and visceral responses, from the much-larger-than-life Wild Man by Ron Mueck, to Sam Jinks diminutive, coiled human figures with fox-heads, and Natasha Bieniek's intimate miniature portraits.

Patricia Piccinini's The long awaited is displayed in a muted room, with plenty of scope for viewers to gaze and ponder and change their minds about nurture and humanity.

Ostensibly a realistic sculpture of a young boy cradling a strange, ugly creature on a bench, the piece is actually about cross-generational love.

"It's a portrait of intimacy between generations," Piccinini said.

"She's obviously a grandmother-type figure, and I think the relationship between these different generations can be very special, and the most important part of that work is that she's lying on his lap, and she's letting him comfort her, and that is my definition of love."

Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale in terms of size and intimacy, Bieniek's miniature paintings encourage close examination that, all of a sudden, feel like spying.

"What I really wanted to do is take representational painting to an ultimate extreme. I wanted to test the limits of painting and push the boundaries between scale and representation," she said.

"I wanted to create the illusion of the keyhole effect, and I think that's about building up this tension or relationship between the viewer and the work, almost as if the viewer is invading the subject's personal space."

Gallery director Angus Trumble insisted that audiences would leave the show and "fall into the arms of a complete stranger, having realised what it means to be human", such was the depth of response the works would provoke.

But curator Penny Grist's aspirations were more modest.

"I'm hoping people walk out and they walk into our permanent collection and they see the fall of skin and the time of life and they speculate on things like whether someone's hands shook while they were speaking, what their voice might have sounded like or what their childhood memories might have been that they remembered when they're in their old age," she said.

"I want them to have gone through that experience of the visceral encounter with the work, of thinking about these themes that we've isolated and then be able to translate them and look at the permanent collection and look at people."

In the flesh opens at the National Portrait Gallery on November 7 and runs until March 9.