The National Portrait Gallery has unveiled its exhibition lineup for 2025, promising a year packed with must-see shows. Two highly anticipated exhibitions, The Face Magazine: Culture Shift and Edvard Munch Portraits, kick things off in February and March.
As summer arrives, the spotlight will shift to contemporary portraiture, with the groundbreaking artist Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting and the prestigious Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award taking centre stage.
In the latter half of the year, photography steps into the limelight. Autumn and winter will feature Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World and the ever-popular Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize, which will focus on the evolving art of 20th—and 21st-century portrait photography.
From iconic bohemian portraits to cutting-edge contemporary work, 2025 is a landmark year. Highlights include the first-ever UK display of Edvard Munch’s paintings, Jenny Saville’s national museum debut, an exploration of The Face magazine’s cultural legacy, and Cecil Beaton’s captivating world of fashion.
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 Britain’s creative and cultural landscape 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 provides 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 Davies and Starr, Sheila Rock, Stéphane Sednaoui, Corinne Day, David Sims, Elaine Constantine and Sølve Sundsbø. It 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 his long career, he consistently produced portraits of family, friends, lovers, writers, artists, patrons, collectors, and 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 critical 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 accompany 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, who provides destination-focused journeys around the world.
Summer 2025
L-R: Drift by Jenny Saville, 2020-2022, Oil and oil stick on canvas, 39 3/8 x 47 1/4 inches, 100 x 120 cm © Jenny Saville. All rights reserved, DACS 2024, Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd., Courtesy Gagosian; Reverse by Jenny Saville, 2002-2003, Oil on canvas, 84 x 96 inches, 213.4 x 243 cm © Jenny Saville. All rights reserved, DACS 2024, Courtesy Gagosian.
Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting 20 June – 7 September 2025
Opening in the summer of 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 this day. Her unique ability to create visceral portraits from thick layers of paint reveals an artist with a deep passion for the process, 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 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 and 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 worldwide. 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.
L-R: Double Portrait of Clara, 2021 by Michael Slusakowicz © Michael Slusakowicz; Zizi, 2023 by Isabella Watling © Isabella Watling.
Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award 10 July – 12 October 2025
The Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award is a prestigious painting competition celebrating the best in contemporary portraiture. 2025’s exhibition will display captivating works from around the world by 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 skill complexity, with artworks exploring 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
L-R: NPG x40415. Cecil Beaton and Stephen Tennant, ‘Riviera Wanderers’ by Maurice Beck and Helen Macgregor, 1927 © reserved; collection National Portrait Gallery, London; The Second Age of Beauty by Cecil Beaton, British Vogue February 1946 © The Condé Nast Publications Ltd. Condé Nast Archive London.
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. In London, Paris, New York, and Hollywood, the fast-moving pace of metropolitan life influenced Beaton’s rapid progression. The exhibition will accompany a new publication, Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World, by Robin Muir.
Winter 2025
L-R: NPG x203001. Ncuti Gatwa by Jonangelo Molinari, August 2022 © Jonangelo Molinari; TikTok from the series No Big Deal by Philippa James, June 2022 © Philippa James.
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 traditional and contemporary approaches to the photographic portrait whilst capturing various characters, moods and locations. The annual In Focus display will also highlight new work by an established photographer. The 2025 edition will unveil 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 in November 2025.
Top Photos: L-R: Seated Model on the Couch, Birgit Prestøe (1906–1986) by Edvard Munch, 1924 © Munchmuseet. Photo: Munchmuseet / Sidsel de Jong; Jazzie B (Soul II Soul) by Enrique Badulescu, April 1989 © Enrique Badulescu; The Second Age of Beauty by Cecil Beaton, British Vogue February 1946 © The Condé Nast Publications Ltd. Condé Nast Archive London.
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Exhibitions 2025, Jenny Saville, National Portrait Gallery, The Face Magazine
