LONDON.- The National Portrait Gallery today announced its 2027 exhibition programme, spanning Pop Art, Impressionism, literature and photography. The year starts with two major shows - Peter Blake: Pop Art Life and Mary Cassatt: Radical Impressionist - arriving in February and March. Summer will bring the 45th edition of the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award, and 100 Writers, an exploration of celebrated figures in English literature. The year concludes with an exhibition of Frank Auerbach’s work and the Winston Taylor Photo Portrait Prize headlining across autumn and winter.
Spring 2027
Peter Blake: Pop Art Life
11 February 2027 – 23 May 2027
Curated in close collaboration with Sir Peter Blake, now aged 94, Peter Blake: Pop Art Life will bring together his portraits made over the last eight decades. True to Blake’s Pop art origins, the exhibition will include portraits completed on found objects such as a military locker, a door and an album cover, with more conventional, realist portraits on canvas of close friends from the worlds of music, fashion and art. It will be the first major institutional show dedicated to Blake’s portraits.
Curated by Tanya Bentley (Contemporary Curator, National Portrait Gallery) and beginning with portraits from his student days in the 1950s, the exhibition will chart a career spent drawing inspiration from popular culture, from the comics and film clubs of his childhood through to images of his blues and rock ‘n’ roll heroes such as Bo Diddley, Sammy Davis Jr and The Beatles. His portraits and shrines to icons such as Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe reveal his interest in fandom and celebrity, while his fictitious portraits of tattooed figures and wrestlers show Blake as a master storyteller and inventor of worlds. Also included will be his sensitive and meticulously constructed portrayals of close friends and musicians such as Ian Dury and Eric Clapton.
By bringing together Blake’s portraits in all their varied forms, this exhibition shows how he has propelled the portrait genre in new directions. His portraits are not simply concerned with capturing an individual’s identity, but encompass and celebrate national and cultural stories, while reflecting the unique creative mind of one of Britain’s most cherished artists.
Mary Cassatt: Radical Impressionist
11 March 2027 – 13 June 2027
Mary Cassatt: Radical Impressionist will be the first retrospective in the UK dedicated to the American artist Mary Cassatt – a landmark moment for a figure who, despite her central role within Impressionism, has remained comparatively underrepresented in Britain.
The exhibition, curated by Dr Sarah Moulden (Senior Curator, 19th-Century Collections), brings together women represented by Cassatt: family and friends, patrons and professional models, as well as figures whose lives remain largely unknown. She was particularly attentive to the rituals of everyday bourgeois life, depicting women taking tea, receiving guests, preparing to go out, attending the theatre and caring for children. These works offer glimpses into the social worlds and daily rituals of the bourgeois society Cassatt inhabited and depicted, while revealing her distinctive way of seeing and representing its women.
Organised in partnership with the Muse d’Orsay and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to mark the centenary of Cassatt’s death, the exhibition opens in Paris in October 2026, London in March 2027 and Boston in July 2027. This international collaboration, curated by Sarah Moulden (Senior Curator of 19th Century Collections, National Portrait Gallery), Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, (conservatrice arts graphiques et peinture, Muse d’Orsay), Anne Robbins (conservatrice peinture, Muse d’Orsay) and Erica Hirshler (Croll Senior Curator of American Paintings, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) brings together an exceptional group of Cassatt’s works, most of which have never been seen in the UK, offering a rare opportunity to encounter her art at scale and to appreciate both its technical innovation and continuing relevance.
Summer 2027
Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award
24 June 2027 – 10 October 2027
The Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award celebrates the very best in contemporary portraiture and is one of the most important platforms for portrait painters today. The exhibition, curated by Sarah Howgate (Senior Curator of Contemporary Collections, National Portrait Gallery), showcases a wide range of approaches, from the classic to the contemporary, inviting viewers to reflect on the creativity of the artists’ processes. Since its inception, the long-running competition has attracted over 50,000 entries from more than 100 countries and has been seen by over six million people. Open to artists over the age of 18, the Award challenges entrants to explore and develop the theme of portraiture, drawing on an impressive range of skill and technique to demonstrate the enduring relevance of portraiture today.
100 Writers
15 July 2027 – 12 September 2027
100 Writers will give visitors the opportunity to come face-to-face with 100 celebrated figures in English literature, from Shakespeare to the present day. More details to be announced soon.
Autumn 2027
Frank Auerbach
Opens 14 October 2027
In the first major posthumous exhibition dedicated to one of Britain’s most significant artists, Frank Auerbach will explore the artist’s distinctive relationship with portraiture during an extraordinary career that spanned seven decades.
Bringing together paintings and drawings from major public and private collections, the exhibition will examine Auerbach’s use of rich layers of paint and unique texture to express his sense of both the momentary presence of and accumulated experiences with each of his subjects. Auerbach frequently returned to the same small circle of trusted friends, family and models over many years, and his representations of key sitters from the 1950s until 2024 will be explored in detail alongside self-portraits from the artist’s early and late career. Auerbach applied the same formal and conceptual approach to his landscape painting, explaining, ‘I paint the places and the people I know well, in order to find their unique image.’ The exhibition will feature his portrayals of Primrose Hill, Mornington Crescent and other locations surrounding his Camden studio, as well as works referencing his longstanding attention to Old Master paintings, and the influence these had on his practice.
The exhibition is organised in partnership with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where it will be presented in Spring 2028 and will constitute the first major museum show in Auerbach’s work in the United States. An accompanying publication will also be available with essays by the curators, Dr Flavia Frigeri (Chief Curator, National Portrait Gallery) and Katherine Brinson (Daskalopoulos Senior Curator of Contemporary Art and Director of Global Initiatives, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) and others.
Winter 2027
Winston Taylor Photo Portrait Prize
Opens 4 November 2027
The Winston Taylor Photo Portrait Prize showcases the very best in contemporary photography, bringing together the work of talented young photographers, gifted amateurs and established professionals.
The competition celebrates a diverse range of images and the fascinating stories behind their creation, from formal commissioned portraits to spontaneous, intimate moments captured between friends and family. Many of the selected images are on display for the first time, exploring both traditional and contemporary approaches to the photographic portrait while capturing a striking range of characters, moods and locations.
