Tanya Bentley

 

Job description

As the Curator, Contemporary I work with the Senior Curator of Contemporary Collections to look after the Gallery’s large collection of contemporary portraits (2000 – now). I research the collection, make acquisitions and commission new portraits. I curate exhibitions, temporary displays and gallery rehangs of contemporary portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery.

I am also curating a three-year rotating exhibition (2023-2026) of materials from the Lucian Freud Archive held at the National Portrait Gallery, including Freud’s sketchbooks, displayed in room 26 as part of the permanent collection.

Biography

I joined the National Portrait Gallery’s curatorial team in 2014 as Curatorial Assistant (2014-17) and then Assistant Curator (2017-23).

Displays and exhibitions that I worked on included: Icons and Identities (lead curator, 2021-2), David Hockney: Drawing from Life (2020 and 2023), Luminary Drawings: Portraits of Film Directors by Nina Mae Fowler (2019), Tacita Dean PORTRAIT (2018), One Unbroken Stream: Ingres to Auerbach (2018), Cézanne Portraits (see blog) (2017-18) and Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the Mask, Another Mask (2017).

I studied a BA in History and French Studies at the University of Birmingham and completed the V&A and Royal College of Art MA in History of Design. I have previously worked at various museums and arts institutions including the London Jewish Cultural Centre, Ben Uri Gallery & Museum, The Barber Institute of Fine Art and Yad Vashem Holocaust Art Museum in Jerusalem.

Research interests

In my role at the National Portrait Gallery, I have specialised in 20th-century and contemporary British portraiture, in particular works on paper.

I was awarded a 2021 Paper Project grant from Getty to curate an exhibition of Lucian Freud's drawings for the new permanent galleries of the National Portrait Gallery. The exhibition drew from the outstanding collections of the Lucian Freud Archive held at the Gallery which includes Freud's sketchbooks, childhood drawings and letters.

Recent Publications

Tanya Bentley, ‘Lucian Freud’s sketchbooks: drawings from life’, Burlington Contemporary Journal (June 2023, issue 8: Drawing)

Icons & Identities, ed. by Rab MacGibbon and Tanya Bentley (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2021)

‘Artists as natural isolators’ and ‘art apart’ in Jewish Renaissance, July 2020

‘19th-Century Kabyle Fibulae’ in Jewellery History Today, Winter 2019 (Issue 34)

‘Biographies of Sitters’ with Sarah Howgate in Tacita Dean: Landscape, Portrait, Still Life (London: Royal Academy of Arts, National Portrait Gallery and National Gallery, 2018), pp.222-224

Polyphonies, ed. by Tanya Bentley et al. (London: V&A/RCA, 2017)

'Claude Cahun and Gillian Wearing: Chronology' in Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the mask, another mask, ed. by Sarah Howgate (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2017), pp.188-199