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Featuring major names of 20th-century art, including Francis Bacon, Peter Blake, Pauline Boty, Richard Hamilton, Gerhard Richter, and Andy Warhol, Iconic: Portraiture from Francis Bacon to Andy Warhol brings rarely-seen works together to explore how artists used photography as both a source and subject matter.

The exhibition focuses on the mid-20th century, particularly the 1960s, when many artists began using photographs as sources for paintings. Often, the photographs were not just appropriated as tools in picture-making but became the subject matter themselves, resulting in paintings that explore imagery and its mediation.

The use of found photographs—imagery discovered in newspapers and magazines—imbued the resulting paintings with a sense of fragile transience. This is evident in Francis Bacon's use of single images from Eadweard Muybridge's famous photographic sequences of the body in motion, which allowed him to accurately render the human form while also conveying vulnerability and isolation.

The exhibition also reflects on the power of the media and the construction of celebrity. Many artists used photos of celebrities as the basis of their works, often evoking nostalgia—even for the recent past. Jann Haworth, for example, depicted stars of early Hollywood in works such as Mae West Dressing Table (1965), while Peter Blake's The Beatles 1962 (1968) looked back at The Beatles at the beginning of their career, just six years earlier.