National Portrait Gallery and National Gallery of Victoria collaborate on major exhibition Who Are You: Australian Portraiture

It is not a sculpture you expect at a portrait gallery. Still, when you see Nest - the 2006 work from Patricia Piccinni - in Who Are You: Australian Portraiture, it is hard to deny that it is a portrait - albeit one between a mother and baby scooter.

"Portraits are representations of people, in one way or another," National Portrait Gallery curator Joanna Gilmour said.

"So it is speaking to those kinds of core human experiences - love intimacy, the relationship between a mother and child. And once again, Patricia Piccinini, as an artist, she's got her very unique take on expressing those kinds of ideas."

Piccinini's Nest is just an example of what Who Are You aims to do - extend the definition of what the average person believes to be portraiture.

And it does this with the help of the National Gallery of Victoria.

The exhibition is the first major collaboration between the two institutions and sees items from both collections come together in conversation. For example, just behind the Piccinni work - which is from the National Gallery of Victoria collection - is John Longstaff's 1891 work, The young mother.

Both are portraits of a mother and child relationship, just one happens to be more "traditional" than the other.

"Bringing the two collections together, it also has that chance to look at your own collection through a different lens," National Gallery of Victoria curator Beckett Rozentals said.

"I think the thing is as well as that the National Gallery of Victoria's collecting priorities are all about the artist and we catalogue via artist.

"But when you come to a portrait gallery, you're often coming for the sitter. So it's looking at your own collection through a different lens."

Presented across five thematic sections, Who Are You raises questions about who we are and how we view others - historically, today and into the future.

It features 130 works by Australian artists including Atong Atem, Howard Arkley, Vincent Namatjira, Brook Andrew and Tracey Moffatt, and features sitters including Albert Namatjira, Queen Elizabeth II and David Gulpilil.

"The show has got this incredible capacity for revealing people and ourselves to ourselves that no one would ordinarily imagine," Ms Gilmour said.

"From my perspective, working in a national portrait gallery, where there are all sorts of expectations ... often expectations of portraits are all about likeness - what someone looks like from the outside. And also the notion that a portrait is all about the subject of the work.

"Whereas what I think both institutions were trying to do with the exhibition was completely eradicate those expectations."

Who Are You: Australia Portraiture is at the National Portrait Gallery until January 29. This is a free exhibition.

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