The first major institutional show of Sir Peter Blake’s portraits, curated with the artist at 94, gathers eight decades of faces from the Beatles to Ian Dury.
The National Portrait Gallery at Trafalgar Square opens the first major institutional exhibition of portraits by Sir Peter Blake on Thursday 11 February 2027. The artist, now 94, worked closely on it.
Blake was born in Dartford in 1932 and trained at the Royal College of Art. From the late 1950s his paintings took their imagery from advertising, the music hall and wrestling.
His Self-Portrait with Badges won the junior prize at the John Moores exhibition in 1961 and became a defining image of British Pop art. In 1967 he and his first wife, the artist Jann Haworth, made the Grammy-winning cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
The exhibition runs from his student portraits of the 1950s to the present. It includes portraits made on found objects, among them a military locker, a door and an album cover. His shrines to Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe hang with invented portraits of tattooed figures and wrestlers.
Realist portraits show close friends from music, fashion and art, among them Ian Dury and Eric Clapton. Heroes such as Sammy Davis Jr. and Bo Diddley hang beside them.
Tanya Bentley, the Gallery’s contemporary curator, has organised the show.