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Guillermo Martin Bermejo: ‘Lines of Feeling’ at National Portrait Gallery
Guillermo Martin Bermejo’s portrait of W.H. Auden is on show in ‘Lines of Feeling: Portrait Drawing Now’ at the National Portrait Gallery in London from 16 January 2025 – 4 January 2026.
‘This is a posthumous drawing of the British-American poet, Wystan Hugh (W.H.) Auden. The Spanish artist, Guillermo Martin Bermejo, draws on paper rescued from discarded books. Through his nostalgic pencil drawings, the artist enters into a creative dialogue with some of the key figures in 20th-century Western literature and art. He explains: ‘I use drawing as a means of speaking to them, as if it were a kind of secret language. In doing so I become the translator of an intimate lost world full of beauty, poetry, and silence.’
Based on a photograph of Auden at 20 years old, Bermejo was inspired to make the drawing by these lines from Auden’s poem ‘Lullaby’ (1937):
‘Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral…’
– Tanya Bentley, Curator, Contemporary, National Portrait Gallery
Visit ‘Lines of Feeling: Portrait Drawing Now’ on the NPG website here
