Es Devlin Is Creating A Living Portrait Of The Entire U.K.

What does a portrait of 69 million people look like? At London's National Portrait Gallery, British artist Es Devlin (b. 1971) is proposing an answer that is less fixed image than evolving process. Her new work, A National Portrait for the National Portrait Gallery, will be installed in the museum's History Makers gallery through October 27, where a framed screen will continuously cycle through portraits generated from public participation.

The project was developed with engineers and technicians at Google, who trained an image-generation model on Devlin's charcoal-and-chalk drawings. Members of the public across the U.K. are invited to upload selfies, which are then transformed into Devlin's visual language and folded into the installation. The result is both technologically mediated and deliberately intimate: a portrait made from individual faces, but shaped by a single hand.

Devlin has described the National Portrait Gallery as“a mirror of us,” adding that the collective portrait can include“all of us, together,” regardless of background or belief. She framed the work as a meditation on national identity, not as a fixed category but as“a continuous process of collective imagination.” In the current political climate, with debate over immigration and belonging still sharply felt in the U.K., that framing gives the project a particular charge.

The museum is extending the work beyond the gallery walls. Alongside the installation, it will offer a step-by-step drawing class online and host onsite drawing workshops during the six-month run, inviting visitors to become both portrait and portraitist. Flavia Frigeri, the collections director at the National Portrait Gallery, said audiences will be able to“not only observe but become part of this portrait itself,” underscoring the participatory logic at the center of the project.

The new commission also reflects Devlin's steady movement from stage design into the museum world. After first becoming known for West End productions and concert backdrops, she has increasingly positioned herself within contemporary art. Recent milestones include Congregation in 2024, which presented portraits of 50 Londoners who had once been refugees; her first museum show at Cooper Hewitt in 2023; and a 20-foot rotating library installed at Miami Art Week last year.

In Devlin's hands, portraiture becomes less a record of likeness than a public conversation about who gets seen, and how a nation chooses to picture itself.

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