LONDON.- A previously unseen portrait of musician Amy Winehouse, taken by fashion photographer Ram Shergill in 2003, has gone on public display for the first time at the National Portrait Gallery, London as part of a major new display of the Gallery’s Contemporary Collection. The portrait, commissioned by The Guardian, but never published, reveals a young and playful Winehouse a year after the release of her debut album Frank, showing her vulnerability before she rose to fame with her second album Back to Black in 2006. The work, acquired by the Gallery in 2017, is shown alongside another rarely seen portrait of Winehouse by Shergill from the same series. The photographs feature in a section of the display devoted to music and fashion from the Nineties to Noughties, including portraits of Blur, Kate Moss, Take That, The Spice Girls and Alexander McQueen with Isabella Blow.

Also unveiled is a drawing of actor and film director, Sir Kenneth Branagh, by artist Colin Davidson, which was gifted to the Gallery in 2018. Completed in 2014 when Branagh was directing his re-make of Disney’s Cinderella, Davidson described the sitting as a ‘meeting of two Belfast men’ having both grown up in Northern Ireland in the 1960s. Other recent acquisitions exhibited for the first time include Chris Levine’s portrait of leading explorer, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, completed in 2017 and one of a series of portraits the artist has made of Fiennes; Sam Barker’s portrait of British astronaut Tim Peake, photographed for the British Airways magazine, High Life in 2017, and a portrait of former Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor by Wolfgang Tillmans, which became the second work by Tillmans to join the Gallery Collection when it was purchased with support from the Ruddock Foundation for the Arts earlier this year.

A special section within the display unveils portraits commissioned by the John Kobal New Work Award over the last four years, a prize previously awarded to a photographer under thirty-five whose work is selected for display in the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition at the Gallery. Portraits of Jack O’Connell by Tereza Červeňová, Felicity Jones by Laura Pannack and Roger Deakins by Josh Redman are on public display for the first time. These are shown alongside the previously unseen commission by 2017 winner, Finnish artist Maija Tammi, who photographed multi-award winning visual effects creator, Ben Morris, a Creative Director at Industrial Light & Magic and a founding member of the company’s London studio. Morris’s extensive career as a visual effects supervisor includes films such as The Golden Compass (2007), for which he earned an Academy Award, War Horse (2011), Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) and Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017). In Tammi’s portrait Morris posed with a 3D facial motion capture head rig, which is designed to record body movements and facial expressions. Using dots on the actor’s face, the device digitally chronicles data that is combined with the on-screen digital character to give the qualities of human performance.

Also on display for the first time are official photographs of The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s wedding in May 2018 by photographer Alexi Lubomirski. The photographs were shared by Kensington Palace across social media and liked and commented on by millions. A selection of these photographs and those by Hugo Burnand documenting the marriage of The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Patron of the National Portrait Gallery, also on display, were acquired by the Gallery in 2018 adding to the rich holdings of royal wedding photographs held in the Gallery Collection.

Alongside works from the Gallery’s Collection sits a complimentary display of works by artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby, from her ongoing series, The Beautyful Ones, which is comprised of portraits of Nigerian youth including some members of the artist’s family. Akunyili Crosby has created four new works in the series especially for the National Portrait Gallery display, which is her first in a UK national institution. Born in Nigeria in 1983, Akunyili Crosby moved to the United States at the age of sixteen, where she has lived and worked ever since. Her recent commission Remain, Thriving, a new work made specifically for the entrance of Brixton Underground station was unveiled in September 2018. Akunyili Crosby shares narratives from her family and friends in her large-scale multi-layered portraits made for the National Portrait Gallery. These are stories that relate her experience of the intermixed cultures of the two countries in which she has lived. Each work draws on the Western tradition of representation and combines painting, drawing, collage, and photographic images. Autobiographical scenes of domestic life are layered with images that reflect a left-over presence of colonial British rule and the influence of American popular culture on daily Nigerian life.

Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Director, National Portrait Gallery, London said “We are delighted to be able to bring out so many new and previously unseen works in our latest Contemporary Collection display. The works on display illustrate the diversity and vitality of twenty-first-century portraiture. Individuals are represented in unique and surprising ways, in a range of media, intended to challenge our understanding of what portraiture is today.”

The National Portrait Gallery’s Contemporary Collection encompasses works produced from 2000 to the present day. The new display features highlights from this collection, including a range of sitters from the younger generation of members of the royal family to novelists, artists, scientists, politicians and sportspeople all of whom are making significant contributions to British culture, history and identity today.