LONDON.- Today, the National Portrait Gallery announced its forward programme of exhibitions for 2025, featuring a varied programme of anticipated shows. The Face Magazine: Culture Shift and Edvard Munch Portraits will be the first exhibitions of the year, opening in February and March 2025. Summer at the Gallery will be dominated by contemporary painted portraiture, with Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting and the Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award taking centre stage. The latter part of the year will focus on 20th and 21st Century photography, with Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World and the Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize headlining across autumn and winter.

Spring 2025

The Face Magazine: Culture Shift
20 February - 18 May 2025

The Face Magazine: Culture Shift celebrates iconic fashion images and portraits from The Face, a trail-blazing youth culture and style magazine that has shaped the creative and cultural landscape in Britain and beyond. From 1980 to 2004, The Face played a vital role in creating contemporary culture. Musicians featured on its covers achieved global success and the models it championed – including a young Kate Moss – became the most recognisable faces of their time. The magazine also launched the careers of many leading photographers and fashion stylists, who were given the creative freedom to radically reimagine the visual language of fashion photography and define the spirit of their times. Relaunched in 2019, the magazine continues to provide a disruptive and creative space for image-makers, championing fresh talent in photography, fashion, music and graphic design. This exhibition will bring together the work of over 80 photographers, including Sheila Rock, Stéphane Sednaoui, Corinne Day, David Sims, Elaine Constantine and Sølve Sundsbø, and will feature over 200 photographs – a unique opportunity to see many of these images away from the magazine page for the first time.

The Face Magazine: Culture Shift is curated by Sabina Jaskot-Gill, Senior Curator of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, together with Curatorial Consultants Lee Swillingham, former Art Director of The Face from 1992 to 1999, and Norbert Schoerner, a photographer whose work featured in the magazine throughout the Nineties and Noughties. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication of the same name, with contributions from Ekow Eshun, Sabina Jaskot-Gill, Jamie Morgan, Pete Paphides and Matthew Whitehouse, and interviews between Nick Logan and Lee Swillingham; Neville Brody, Jill Furmanovsky and Sheila Rock; Elaine Constantine, Glen Luchford and Nancy Rohde; and Norbert Schoerner and Stéphane Sednaoui.

Edvard Munch Portraits
13 March – 15 June 2025

Edvard Munch is widely regarded as one of the great portraitists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the course of his long career, he was consistent in producing portraits of family, friends, lovers, writers, artists, patrons and collectors, together with an extraordinary range of self-portraits. In terms of their energetic execution, bold colour and direct sense of engagement with the sitter, these works have exerted a strong influence on the portrait genre. Edvard Munch Portraits will be the first exhibition in the UK to focus exclusively on this important but sometimes overlooked aspect of the artist’s oeuvre. Curated by Alison Smith, previously Chief Curator of the National Portrait Gallery and now Director of Collections and Research at the Wallace Collection, the exhibition will show how Munch painted portraits as commissions and for personal reasons, with many pictures doubling up as icons or archetypes of the human condition despite being based on the direct observation of named individuals. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication of the same name by Alison Smith, with contributions from the Norwegian art historian, Knut Ljøgodt. The Gallery is grateful for the generous support of our Headline Supporter AKO Foundation and that of our new cultural partner, Viking which provides destination-focused journeys around the world.

Summer 2025

Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting
20 June - 7 September 2025

Opening in summer 2025, Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting will be the first major museum exhibition in the UK dedicated to the work of one of the world’s foremost contemporary artists. Saville rose to prominence in the early 1990s, following her acclaimed degree show at the Glasgow School of Art. In the years since she has played a leading role in the reinvigoration of figurative painting – a genre that she continues to test the limits of to this day. Her unique ability to create visceral portraits from thick layers of paint reveals an artist with a deep passion for the process itself, an act that she experiences as both energetic and bodily.

Bringing together 50 works made throughout the artist’s career, Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting will trace the development of her practice from the 1990s to today, spotlighting key artworks from her career and while exploring her lasting connection to art history. From charcoal drawings to large-scale oil paintings of the human form, this broadly chronological display will include works that question the conventional and historical notions of female beauty, as well as the monumental nudes that launched Saville to acclaim in 1992 and new ‘portraits’ made for the twenty-first century. Rendered in fluorescent, saturated tones, this pioneering series interrogates the connections between the physical and virtual in our image saturated age.

Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting has been created in close collaboration with the artist, with works borrowed from important public and private collections from around the world. The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive publication of the same name, which includes texts from Emanuele Coccia, Dr Nicholas Cullinan, John Elderfield, Roxane Gay, and Andrea Karnes, as well as a conversation between Saville and the show’s curator, Sarah Howgate, and newly commissioned studio images by artist Sally Mann. The Gallery is grateful for the generous support of Gagosian, AMA Collection, Nicholas Leonidas Goulandris and Christie’s.

Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award
10 July - 12 October 2025

The Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award is a prestigious painting competition that celebrates the very best in contemporary portraiture. 2025’s exhibition will display captivating works from around the world, by both self-taught and more established painters, that provide a snapshot of portrait painting today. Since its inception, the long-standing competition has attracted over 40,000 entries from more than 100 countries and has been seen by over 6 million people. Artists demonstrate an impressive range and complexity of skill, with artworks exploring both classical and innovative techniques that show the enduring relevance of portraiture today. A new publication, including all works exhibited as part of the Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award, will be available from July 2025.

Autumn 2025

Cecil Beaton's Fashionable World
9 October 2025 - 11 January 2026

Renowned as a fashion illustrator, Oscar-winning costume designer, social caricaturist and writer, Cecil Beaton – ‘The King of Vogue’ – was an extraordinary force in the 20th century British and American creative scenes. Elevating fashion and portrait photography into an art form, his era-defining photographs captured beauty, glamour, and star power in the interwar and early post-war eras. No previous exhibition has exclusively spotlighted his ground-breaking fashion work, a pivotal aspect of his career that laid the foundation for his later successes. With this in mind, Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World will showcase Beaton at his most triumphant – from the Jazz Age and the Bright Young Things, to the high fashion brilliance of the Fifties and the glittering, Oscar-winning success of My Fair Lady. In between, he endured the hardship of war as a photographer of the home front and of the Western Desert campaign and beyond. From 1939 as a royal photographer, by appointment to the House of Windsor, he propelled the monarchy into the modern age.

Curated by Robin Muir, a Contributing Editor to British Vogue (to which Beaton himself contributed for over fifty years), this new exhibition will chart Beaton’s rapid progression through the fashionable worlds of film, art and couture, influenced in London, Paris, New York and Hollywood by the fast-moving pace of metropolitan life. The exhibition will be accompanied by a new publication, Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World, by Robin Muir.

Winter 2025

Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize
13 November 2025 - 8 February 2026

The Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize showcases the work of talented young photographers, gifted amateurs and established professionals in the very best of contemporary photography. The competition celebrates a diverse range of images and tells the fascinating stories behind the creation of works, from formal commissioned portraits to more spontaneous and intimate moments capturing friends and family. The selected images, many of which are on display for the first time, explore both traditional and contemporary approaches to the photographic portrait whilst capturing a range of characters, moods and locations. The annual In Focus display will also highlight new work by an established photographer. The 2025 edition will see the unveiling of a new commission for the Gallery’s Collection, to be announced in November 2024. A new publication, including all works exhibited as part of the Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize, will be available from November 2025.

“As my time as Interim Director comes to an end, I’m delighted to be presenting such a wonderful and varied programme of exhibitions for 2025. From Munch and Beaton to contemporary photographers and painters, the programme has something for everyone to enjoy, so I would like to thank our sponsors for all their support in helping us deliver this.The Gallery has an exciting year ahead with Victoria Siddall starting as the new Director, who I have no doubt will take the NPG from strength to strength.” ---Michael Elliott, Interim Director, National Portrait Gallery

“I am thrilled to be joining the National Portrait Gallery as Director and I really look forward to this rich and wide-ranging programme of exhibitions for the year ahead. It is a privilege to work with my new colleagues as well as many artists, supporters and partners to deliver the Gallery’s ambitious plans, and I would like to thank the excellent NPG team for their work in curating such a thoughtful and exciting programme. We have so much to look forward to in 2025.” -- Victoria Siddall, Incoming Director, National Portrait Gallery