National Portrait Gallery announces Portrait23: Identity exhibition for March 2023

Presented across four gallery spaces from March 10, Portrait23: Identity is a major contemporary art exhibition that includes commissions from 23 Australian artists and collectives who have been invited to create portraits without constraints or boundaries.

National Portrait Gallery director of collection and exhibitions Sandra Bruce said Portrait23 was an opportunity for the National Portrait Gallery to broaden preconceived ideas about portraiture and representation.

"Each of the artists selected is well-known and influential in their own right, but many would not consider themselves to be portraitists," she said.

"The National Portrait Gallery is excited to work with them on this innovative, provocative exhibition, that moves beyond expected notions of what portraiture conventionally is.

"A portrait is generally understood to be a literal visual likeness of a person, perhaps going so far as to reference their interests and endeavours. With Portrait23, through directly engaging with some of Australia's most exciting contemporary artists, we are bringing new, diverse concepts and perspectives around the genre, and its inherent universal theme of identity, to the table."

The expansive exhibition and program will feature new work from multi-award-winning contemporary Australian artists and collectives working across every state and territory.

Responding to the broad concept of identity, each artist has been invited to realise a new approach to portraiture across a range of mediums, not only painting, drawing and photography, but street art, suspended textiles, performance, ceramics, bronze, and soft sculpture.

National Portrait Gallery curator exhibitions Penny Grist said Portrait23: Identity was an invitation for artists to stretch, push and break through the constraints of portraiture.

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"The exhibition has been defined by the artists actively asserting a multitude of experiences and perspectives that have the potential to expand and enrich our understanding of portraiture's potential," she said.

Portrait23: Identity will be accompanied by a publication featuring nine commissioned pieces of writing from leading Australian authors reflecting broadly, and personally, on the notion of identity, as well as a program of performances, lectures and events.

National Portrait Gallery First Nations curator and Meriam woman Rebecca Ray said Portrait23: Identity opened the gallery up to a new kind of dialogue.

"While identity has always remained a core feature of portraiture, this exhibition reveals a shift in the genre towards honouring the power of storytelling," she said.

"What we see are deeply personal evocations of themes that resonate collectively - cultural knowledge, the body, feminism, visibility and invisibility, activism, community, legacies of ongoing colonisation and journeys of migration."

Portrait23: Identity will be a free exhibition and exclusive to Canberra.

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