Exhibitions

Liberated from the constraints of pleasing a sitter, self-portraits have provided artists with the creative independence and autonomy to experiment with a myriad of possibilities. The reasons for creating self-portraits have been equally varied, ranging from the ability to test different styles and techniques, to use them as a therapeutic tool, to authentically express the artist’s personal voice, challenge stereotypes or grapple with wider societal themes.

This display showcases a range of responses to self-portraiture, featuring several recent acquisitions and works that are displayed at the National Portrait Gallery for the first time.

Upsilon Gallery London presents What Remains Visible, a group exhibition featuring works by Tonye Ekine, Lu Gan, Katie Kaur, Jenny Lewis, and Ruarí Milne. Bringing together painting and photography, the exhibition explores light not simply as a condition of vision but as a material through which memory, perception, and history are continually negotiated.

At the heart of her practice is ‘UnBecoming’- a series about rupture and repair, connection and separation, and the body as a site of negotiation. A rhythmic meditation on impermanence and the in-between, it considers the continual process of becoming through unbecoming.

Through a diverse collection of fine and decorative art, personal stories and objects, Gender Stories traces the spectrum of genders and their expression across time and place, examining how gender intersects with our sex, class, sexuality and heritage to shape who we are.

Featuring works by David Hockney, Catherine Opie, Grayson Perry, Rene Matić, Zanele Muholi and Del LaGrace Volcano, this ground-breaking exhibition explores the role art can play in questioning traditional gender roles.

This exhibition brings together three bodies of work by contemporary women photographers – Heather Agyepong, Jenny Lewis and Lydia Goldblatt – each of whom turns the camera inward to explore the shifting terrain of selfhood, memory and interior life.

Together, these works position photography not as a mirror of the external world but as a medium of introspection: probing the unseen, mapping states of being, and articulating what resists easy visibility. A Mind of One’s Own foregrounds the courage of artists who use the medium to test the boundaries of selfhood, embracing doubt, rupture and renewal as part of what it means to live fully in one’s own mind. The exhibition articulates varied strategies for representing inner life—spanning performance, documentary, abstraction and conceptual staging.