The award focuses on portraiture today: how artists use paint to represent people, bodies, character, emotion, intimacy and social identity. The National Portrait Gallery describes it as a highly competitive award for artists over 18, open to a wide range of classical and innovative techniques.

The Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award 2026 brings together 52 selected portraits by contemporary artists from around the world. The works were chosen from more than 1,400 entries, making the exhibition a snapshot of where painted portraiture stands now.

You’re watching:

• Contemporary faces painted with intimacy, skill and risk
• Portraits that move between realism, experimentation and emotional depth
• Artists using the human figure to explore identity, memory, vulnerability and presence
• A global conversation about what it means to represent someone today
• A prize exhibition where every painting is also a relationship: artist, sitter, viewer

The result is not one story, but many encounters. Each portrait asks the same question differently: what can a painted face still reveal in an age of endless images?

Yes — if you love contemporary painting, portraiture and discovering artists early.

This award matters because it keeps portrait painting alive as a serious contemporary language. Since its beginning, the competition has attracted more than 40,000 entries from over 100 countries and has been seen by more than 6 million people.

The National Portrait Gallery is already one of the best places in the world to think about faces, fame, identity and memory. Seeing this award there makes the experience feel especially alive: not only portraits from history, but portraits being made now.

Don’t rush from face to face — let each portrait become a meeting.

Look first at the eyes, then posture, hands, clothing and background.

Ask what kind of relationship the artist had with the sitter.

Compare technique with feeling: a technically brilliant portrait is not always the most moving one.

Notice which works feel public, private, staged, vulnerable or confrontational.