One of the UK’s most prominent painters, Jenny Saville, will be the subject of a blockbuster show at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in London next year.
Opening on 20 June 2025, Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting, will comprise 50 works made throughout the artist’s career, and will trace the development of her practice from the 1990s to today.
“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,” says an NPG statement. Sponsors include Saville’s gallery, Gagosian, and Christie’s.
In 2012, Saville showed a series of works, including Atonement Studies: Central Panel (Rosetta) from 2005-6, at Modern Art Oxford in a previous retrospective.
She was born in Cambridge, England, in 1970. Since 1994, Saville has been strongly associated with the Young British Artists—the group that were championed by the collector Charles Saatchi in the early 1990s.
“But she is distinct from many artists that were part of that scene: at the heart of her work is a commitment to painting human bodies but with the expressive vigour of abstraction,” writes Ben Luke who interviewed her on The Art Newspaper’s A Brush With podcast in 2020.
Asked which painting she’d most like to live with, Saville responded: "I'd probably choose Las Meninas [by Velázquez] because there's so much in it about painting...it would last all my life to work it out. It's a treaty on painting, isn't it?”
Felix Auerbach by Edvard Munch, 1906
© Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
A key show dedicated to Edvard Munch’s portraits also opens next year at the NPG, featuring paintings of the 19th-century Norwegian artist’s friends, lovers, writers, artists, patrons and collectors, together with a range of self-portraits. “[This] will be the first exhibition in the UK to focus exclusively on this important but sometimes overlooked aspect of the artist’s oeuvre,” says an NPG statement.
Edvard Munch Portraits will open on 13 March 2025, with the “headline supporter” AKO Foundation, a charitable trust established in 2013 by the Norwegian businessman Nicolai Tangen who opened a new museum in Kristiansand, southern Norway, earlier this year.
Other shows launching next year include Cecil Beaton's Fashionable World (9 October-11 January 2026), which focuses on the 20th-century UK photographer’s “rapid progression through the fashionable worlds of film, art and couture”. Meanwhile The Face Magazine: Culture Shift (20 February-18 May) will include works from 80 photographers, such as Stéphane Sednaoui and Corinne Day, who contributed to the influential youth culture and style magazine that flourished in the 1980s.
The Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award, described as “a snapshot of portrait painting today” also returns to the NPG (10 July-12 October). In 2023, gallery faced criticism for accepting sponsorship from the eponymous law firm which has represented British Petroleum (BP).
- The Face Magazine: Culture Shift, 20 February - 18 May 2025; Edvard Munch Portraits, 13 March-15 June 2025; Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting, 20 June-7 September 2025; Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award, 10 July - 12 October 2025; Cecil Beaton's Fashionable World, 9 October 2025-11 January 2026; National Portrait Gallery, London