Who Are You: Inside the new exhibition co-curated by National Portrait Gallery and National Gallery of Victoria

The first has been on display since the Diamond Jubilee celebrations, the second will be hung, just weeks after the Queen's death, as part of the upcoming exhibition Who Are You: Australian Portraiture.

When you take in to context the rules and regulations around creating royal portraits - the specific message that it needs to portray - it's not surprising that there is a common thread between them. What is impressive is the timeframe they were taken in.

The two Borland works - one depicting the Queen in front of a golden glitter background for the Golden Jubilee and the other using a modern floral pattern backdrop - were both taken within minutes of each other in 2001. (And both are withheld from media publication at this time.)

"Polly Burland had an opportunity to create portraits for a portfolio of the Queen that was produced to celebrate her Golden Jubilee in 2002. She was only allowed to have five minutes with the Queen, so she tried to do as much preparation in advance as she could," National Portrait Gallery curator Joanna Gilmour says.

"And so Her Majesty walks into the room and stands in front of the camera and Polly says she just froze - she just wasn't expecting to be so floored by this incredibly beautiful, incredibly small woman.

"Polly forgot everything that she was supposed to do and say, and everything that she had planned to do and by the time she came to her senses, she only had three minutes of her five minutes left. And in that time, she somehow managed to shoot two rolls of film, one in each camera and a roll of film using each backdrop."

Borland's portrait of the Queen in front of the gold glitter background is one of the 130 works by Australian artists featured in Who Are You, an exhibition that aims to explore personal identity in a bid to understand national identity.

Co-curated with the National Gallery of Victoria - the first time the two institutions have had a major collaboration - there are works from Patricia Piccinini, William Yang, Vincent Namatjira, Brook Andrew and Tracey Moffatt, and featured sitters including Albert Namatjira, Nicky Winmar and David Gulpili.

But by bringing the two collections together, Gilmour says it creates a conversation that helps to broaden the often narrow definition of portraiture. Showing that portraiture is more than a pretty face on a canvas.

"There's often a perception outside the institution that somehow portraits sit a little bit outside of the rest of the art world," she says.

"There's that perception that portraits are mostly about the subject of the portrait. Whereas for us here at the National Portrait Gallery, they're representations of a particular subject, but they're artworks in their own right as well.

"It's been kind of liberating, I think, for us to be able to work on an exhibition that demonstrates the way that portraiture isn't outside of art. And we can do that by putting portraits from our collection in conversation with a collection of works from the National Gallery of Victoria, which of course has been collecting since the 1860s."

As the name suggests, Who Are You explores identity, and how the artist depicts that. As National Gallery of Victoria curator Beckett Rozentals says, it's finding unconventional ways of representing likeness, looking at who we are, and how we view others, historically, today and into the future.

And in some cases, such as Napier Waller's self-portrait, The Man in Black - one of the works on loan from the National Gallery of Victoria - this means looking at how the artist wants his own image to be projected into the world.

Waller was in the Australian Imperial Force in World War I where he was severely wounded and needed to have his right arm amputated at the shoulder. Still, this 1925 self-portrait depicts the artist with both arms.

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"[The injury] was a huge life-changing event, especially for a right-handed artist. And he had to reteach himself and modify his practice considerably," National Gallery of Victoria curator Beckett Rozentals says.

"The Man in Black is a very curious work - he presents himself as elegantly dressed, the debonair, he's got a confident stance but he holds his hands in front of him. So he's presenting himself to the audience before his injury.

"So there's a lot we look at in these images and often as well in a self-portrait they might put in the background work which they've completed in the past and for instance, in this Napier Waller, there's an image of a work he did for the State Library in Melbourne. It's sort of, look at me, I'm an artist, and here is some of my work behind me."

The exhibition itself is divided into five sections, one of which is intimacy - a section that Rozentals says is the perfect opportunity to take a look at the role of nudes in portraiture.

It's a portraiture style that has prevailed throughout history, developing in tandem with gender politics. It's quite a personal style of portrait, where you view the sitter in their most vulnerable state.

But Rozental says the exhibition raises the question about who society accepts to be pictured in a nude portrait and who they are surprised by.

"We have a work by Pat Larter titled Marty. [Larter] challenged society's ideas by providing striking and humorous images, and Marty was in a series of works, where she visited brothels to photograph male sex workers and chose the model in a full frontal nude," she says.

"And this challenges how we consumed images of the female frontal nude with a lot more ease than they do viewing the male nudes and even just watching people in the gallery space not think twice about looking at the female nude, but there's something that's still very risque about the male nude."

Who Are You: Australian Portraiture is at the National Portrait Gallery from October 1. For more information go to portrait.gov.au.

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