An exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia looks at representations of the figure by female artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, reports LIZ HOBDAY.

“DEEP Inside My Heart” at the National Gallery of Australia takes its name from a print by two big names in the global art world.

Tracey Emin and Louise Bourgeois (a major Bourgeois exhibition has just opened at the Art Gallery of NSW) collaborated on 16 prints in 2009-10, for a series with the overall title “Do Not Abandon Me”.

Bourgeois began the works by painting gouache figures on paper in red, blue and black, and passing them on to Emin, who carried them with her as she travelled the world, too scared to touch them.

Finally Emin added words and tiny fantastical figures, giving meaning to the emotions suggested by Bourgeois’ silhouettes.

“Do Not Abandon Me” was one of the final artworks Bourgeois completed before she died in 2010, and the National Gallery acquired the series in 2020.

(“If Deep Inside My Heart” was one of several contenders for the exhibition title, close inspection reveals other titles by the duo would have been far too rude to use.)

The Emin and Bourgeois series sits alongside works by women artists from 1968 until 2018, including a group of early sculptures by late Australian sculptor Bronwyn Oliver.

“They’re like nothing I’ve ever seen, and I suspect nothing you’ve ever seen before,” curator Lucina Ward told AAP.

One Oliver sculpture titled “Hermaphrodite” features flanks of scales in a tripartite structure with protruding horns.

What’s more, it’s hollow, with lips surrounding a hole at its top.

The bodily inspiration that’s everywhere in Oliver’s sculpture and the exhibition overall is a response to the artists living through a period in which minimalism and materiality dominated the art world, Ward explained.

As art by women came to the fore in the late ’80s, they began to use the body to make statements about politics, gender, and identity.

“They’re in effect revisiting the idea of what a body can say about what it is to be a woman in contemporary society,” she said.

The exhibition is another step in the NGA’s “Know My Name” project, which aims to improve the national collection’s holdings by women artists.

The project was originally focused on Australians, but has expanded to the gallery’s international collection, too.

“Deep Inside My Heart” is also one of the last exhibitions to be installed under the gallery’s upgraded lighting installed during 2023.

“With this fantastic new lighting system, we can make everything sing without actually having too much light exposure on the materials,” said Ward.

“Deep Inside My Heart”, National Gallery until May.