The gallery will present an exhibition centred on the nude, one of several Sydney events featuring the naked body.

It’s one of art’s oldest subjects going back thousands of years to the bronze and marble statues of the Ancient Greeks – but the nude still has the power to shock.

An exhibition opening at the Art Gallery of NSW in November will explore a wide range of artistic responses to the naked body through 100 works from London’s Tate collection by renowned artists such as Pablo Picasso, Lucian Freud, Henri Matisse and Louise Bourgeois.

^{Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss (1901-04), photo © Tate London, 2016}

Entitled Nude: art from the Tate collection, the exhibition will include one of the world’s most famous images of erotic love: Auguste Rodin’s sculpture The Kiss from 1901–04. It is the first time the iconic work has ever left Europe.

Spanning paintings, sculptures, photographs and prints, as well as many of the major art movements including romanticism, cubism, expressionism, realism, surrealism and feminism, other notable works in the exhibition include Pierre Bonard’s The Bath from 1925, Picasso’s Nude Woman in a Red Armchair from 1932 and Ron Mueck’s Wild Man from...