By arts editor HELEN MUSA

The National Gallery of Australia has on Thursday unveiled the full suite of 20 huge Saint Francis tapestries by Arthur Boyd to the assembled press before the exhibition Arthur Boyd: Tapestries goes on show to the public from Saturday.

The tapestries were created in collaboration with the Manufactura de Tapeçarias de Portalegre, Portugal.

The Life of St Francis tapestries comprise a cycle of 20 textiles produced between 1970 and 1974. Boyd commissioned the Manufactura to transform his pastel drawings into 2.5 by 3.4 metre tapestries and they were acquired for the national collection in 1975 by the gallery’s inaugural director, James Mollison.

Each large-scale tapestry depicts a scene in Boyd’s retelling of the life of one of the most venerated figures in human history. Woven at a scale more than 20 times larger than Boyd’s original source images, each contains between four and 8.5 million stitches.

They are displayed alongside Boyd’s lithographs, pastels and drawings, exploring the creative and technical processes involved in their translation across media.

Director of the Manufactura, Vera Fino, whose father, Guy Fino, was director at the time of Boyd’s commission, said: “At the time of production, and maybe even still today, Arthur Boyd’s tapestries are the most complex the workshop had ever made, where we pushed the medium to its limits.”

Elspeth Pitt, senior curator, Australian Art, said the 20 works were a testament to Boyd’s artistry and the Manufactura de Tapeçarias de Portalegre’s unique tapestry-making skills, unlike any other in the world.

NGA director Nick Mitzevich said there were many acclaimed works of art in the national collection that are loved by the public but that there were still corners of the collection where “undiscovered” gems lay, and this series was one of those.

A workshop space titled The Weavers’ Studio, co-programmed with the Australian Tapestry Workshop within the exhibition, gives visitors opportunities to experience weaving-related talks and activities, while the accompanying publication, which includes full reproductions of the tapestries, explores the textile suite’s context and the story of its creation.

Arthur Boyd: Tapestries, National Gallery of Australia, June 20-October 18.