National Portrait Gallery London Announces 2025 Exhibitions

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London‘s National Portrait Gallery has announced its exhibitions for 2025, including a solo show by painter Jenny Saville.

Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting (20 June–7 September 2025) will gather 50 works from the 1990s on—including the curvy nudes, characterised by thick layers and saturated hues that defamiliarise the female form—that catapulted her to stardom.

In 2018, Saville’s self-portrait Propped (1992) sold at Sotheby’s London for U.S. $12.5 million, making her the most expensive living woman artist at auction. For comparison, Yayoi Kusama’s record, set for an ‘Infinity Nets’ painting sold at Phillips in 2022, is $10.5 million.

From 1988 to 1992, Saville studied at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland, where she focused her interest on the imperfections of flesh, its social implications and taboos. She later followed a plastic surgeon at work, her sightings of reconstructed bodies informing her practice.

The exhibition will also feature more recent portraits rendered in fluorescent hues that suggest a commingling of the real and the virtual.

The Gallery will also present paintings in the exhibition Edvard Munch Portraits—which features the semblances of family, friends, patrons, and the painter himself from 13 March to 15 June—and the Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award exhibition from 10 July to 12 October 2025.

The £35,000 Portrait Award was won this year by Antony Williams for his portrait Jacqueline with Still Life (2020). The 2024 award exhibition continues at the National Portrait Gallery through 27 October.

Photography from The Face magazine, which published from 1980 to 2004, will show in the exhibition The Face Magazine: Culture Shift (20 February–18 May 2025). The exhibition features some 200 works by 80 photographers, including Corinne Day, Sheila Rock, and David Sims, whose work helped shape the cultural landscape in Britain and beyond.

Fashion photographs from an earlier era, as seen through the lens of British photographer and Oscar-winning costume designer Cecil Beaton (1904–1980), will feature in Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World (9 October 2025–1 January 2026).

Finally, the Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize exhibition will return from 13 November 2025 to 8 February 2026. The 2024 prize exhibition opens on 14 November and features shortlisted photographers Adam Ferguson, Jesse Navarre Vos, Tjitske Sluis, and Steph Wilson. During the exhibition, last year’s awardee, London-based photographer Serena Brown, will unveil her commission for the Gallery collection. —[O]

Main image: Jenny Saville, Reverse (2002–2003). Oil on canvas. 213.4 x 243 cm. © Jenny Saville. All rights reserved, DACS 2024. Courtesy Gagosian.