The images leap out of the dark walls, surreal and vivid and several metres high.
But they're not painted on canvas - these 50-year-old images by Australian artist Arthur Boyd are made up of literally millions of tiny stitches, by one of the world's foremost tapestry studios in Portugal.
The 20 works explore the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, a historic figure who had fascinated Boyd since he was a child.
He had originally created a series of pastels to illustrate a book about the saint, but when they were rejected, he reimagined them as a series of tapestries instead.
In 1970, he commissioned the Manufactura de Tapecarias de Portalegre in Portugal to transform his paintings into 2.5 by 3.4-metre tapestries, which took four years to complete.
The National Gallery of Australia, at the time a collection without a permanent home and led by inaugural director James Mollison, acquired the works in 1975 soon after their completion.
Boyd had planned to exhibit them together in Melbourne, but the show never happened.
This is the first time they're all on display together in the 50 years since they were made.
Senior curator Elspeth Pitt said the works had mainly been in storage during that time.
"Some of them have been shown in the past individually and in groups, but never the complete series," she said.
"It's quite incredible that it's taken 50 years, but it's really magnificent."
The Manufactura de Tapecarias de Portalegre in Portugal was co-founded in 1946 by Guy Fino.
Today, his daughter, Vera Fino, runs the world-famous atelier, and she was in Canberra this week to watch the exhibition being installed.
"They are just incredible," she said.
She thinks she remembers meeting Boyd when she was a child, although she tended to confuse him in her memory with another great artist, John Olsen, who also commissioned works from the Manufactura.
She said the atelier's artisans - all women - used the same techniques today as those developed by her father.
The works were completely hand-made on looms, with no technological interventions; the women work in rows, side-by-side, for many hours a day.
She said the women completed around three square centimetres a day, and that each tapestry took around six months to complete.
"They weave following lines ... 60 to 80 centimeters wide, they sit side by side," she said.
"It depends on the size of the tapestry, but [for] some tapestries, Boyd was in a hurry to get them, so they were woven by shifts, and in some we had 21 weavers, which means three shifts."
She said the work of preparing the original reference drawing the weavers would work from was much more complicated because of how the colours and strands had to be chosen to honour the artist's vision.
"When we mix colours, they are constructed, really - the colour is constructed specifically for that tapestry," she said.
She said Boyd was very particular about colour, and wasn't always satisfied with the early results.
But the works, more than 20 times larger than Boyd's original source images and each containing between 4 and 8.5 million stitches, are startlingly precise renditions of his surreal, visceral visions of the story of Saint Francis.
James Mollison bought the tapestries around the same time as he acquired some of the collection's most iconic works, including Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles and Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly series.
At the time of the purchase, Boyd also gave the gallery around 4000 other artworks, some of which are on display alongside the tapestries.
Ms Pitt said the gallery had been wanting to display the works since the last major Boyd exhibition in 2014, and now was the time.
"They're fascinating works, because there is no fixed chronology," she said.
"For an artist who's so well known, or so highly regarded as a landscape painter, there is no landscape apart from colour, so they really stand out in this practice."
