Curated in close collaboration with Sir Peter Blake, Peter Blake: Pop Art Life will bring together portraits made over his trailblazing eight-decade career.
Featuring icons from Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe to Eric Clapton and The Beatles, alongside intimate portrayals of friends and family, the exhibition will reflect the creative mind of one of Britain’s most beloved artists. Peter Blake: Pop Art Life runs from 11 February to 23 May 2027.
Opening on 11 February, The National Portrait Gallery will launch its 2027 exhibition programme with the first ever major institutional exhibition dedicated to the portraiture of renowned artist Sir Peter Blake. Curated by Tanya Bentley (Contemporary Curator, National Portrait Gallery), in close collaboration with Sir Peter Blake himself, the exhibition will bring together Blake’s portraits in all their varied forms.
Featuring around 70 works, Peter Blake: Pop Art Life will chart how the artist developed his singular and instantly recognisable aesthetic and explore some of his continued fascinations over the course of his practice, showcasing how the artist has propelled the portrait genre in imaginative new directions.
Beginning with portraits made as a student in the 1950s, the exhibition journeys through Blake’s career spent drawing inspiration from popular culture, from the comics and film clubs of his childhood through to images of his blues, rock ‘n’ roll and pop heroes such as Bo Diddley, Sammy Davis Jr and The Beatles. 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. Though best known for his Pop art-era works, figurative realism remains at the core of his practice. In these intimate portraits, with their carefully calibrated realism, Blake showcases his meticulous painterliness and commitment to capturing a very realistic likeness of his sitters.
Blake’s portraits are not simply concerned with capturing an individual but encompass and celebrate national and cultural stories. His shrines to icons such as Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe reveal his interest in fandom and celebrity, becoming a form of collective portraiture in which fans and their lived experiences are reflected. His fictitious portraits of tattooed figures and wrestlers reveal Blake’s masterful capacity for storytelling and worldbuilding alongside his deep interest in people and constructing identity through the objects and imagery we surround ourselves with.
Peter Blake: Pop Art Life will be the first show dedicated to the artist in a London national museum in nearly 30 years. Together these works reveal Blake’s distinctive vision that has expanded the possibilities of portraiture, while reflecting the imagination, sharp wit and boyish curiosity of one of Britain’s most cherished artists.
I hope visitors feel as if this is a voyage of discovery, that they will be surprised to see pictures they haven’t seen before or look at my work from a different perspective. It’s not about me being a portrait painter, it’s about painting people.” Sir Peter Blake
Although Blake has rarely before been described as a portrait artist, this exhibition reveals how central people have always been to his practice from his cultural heroes and invented wrestlers to his friends and creative collaborators. It has been an enormous privilege to work with Peter and his wife, Chrissy, to bring this exhibition to life. As the first major exhibition of his portraits, it offers a long-overdue opportunity to celebrate a British icon and the extraordinary reach of his artistic legacy and impact on portraiture.”
Tanya Bentley, Contemporary Curator, National Portrait Gallery
Peter Blake: Pop Art Life at National Portrait Gallery, London from 11 February to 23 May, 2027
Find more information and book tickets here.
