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The National Portrait Gallery acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and to Elders both past and present.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are warned that this website contains images of deceased persons.

Bare
Previous exhibition
from Friday 14 August until Sunday 15 November 2015
Dame Edna Everage
Dame Edna Everage, 1982 (printed 2002) Lewis Morley. © Lewis Morley Archive LLC

Bare: Degrees of undress celebrates the candid, contrived, natural, sexy, ironic, beautiful, and fascinating in Australian portraiture that shows a bit of skin. Bare selects and remixes portraits from our collection around elements of nakedness. Fun and forthright, the exhibition will interrogate our instinctive, embedded and complex reactions to the bare. Surprising relationships appear, including portraits of Australia’s greatest sportspeople and our foremost creative achievers.

Portraits of Billy Slater, Germaine Greer, Dame Edna Everage, Matthew Mitcham, David Gulpilil, Megan Gale and many others are on display. It is intriguing to explore the subtle but crucial differences between the naked and the nude, being dressed or undressed and seeing someone clothed or unclothed. Bare reflects on the decision to uncover part, or all, of the body in a portrait, which says as much about the self, personality, identity and character as a selection of clothing.

62 portraits

1 Hetti, 1990 (printed 2013) Michael Riley. © Michael Riley/Copyright Agency, 2023. 2 Billy Slater, 2005 Julian Kingma. © Julian Kingma. 3 Professor Germaine Greer, 1999 Polly Borland. © Polly Borland. 4 Dave Graney and Clare Moore, 1996 Bleddyn Butcher. © Bleddyn Butcher Bleddyn@Tenderprey.com. 5 Waiting for Zipporah (Christine Anu), 2002 Elizabeth Barden. © Elizabeth Barden. 6 Dan Sultan, 2011 Martin Philbey. © Martin Philbey.

Related people

Penelope Grist (curator)

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Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia

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The National Portrait Gallery acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and to Elders past and present. We respectfully advise that this site includes works by, images of, names of, voices of and references to deceased people.

This website comprises and contains copyrighted materials and works. Copyright in all materials and/or works comprising or contained within this website remains with the National Portrait Gallery and other copyright owners as specified.

The National Portrait Gallery respects the artistic and intellectual property rights of others. The use of images of works of art reproduced on this website and all other content may be restricted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (Cth). Requests for a reproduction of a work of art or other content can be made through a Reproduction request. For further information please contact NPG Copyright.

The National Portrait Gallery is an Australian Government Agency