The first image is sky high and spectacular: David Bowie, turning to face the world from a silver screen in his twenties. Colossal photographs glimmer and shift in two-storey projections at the foot of the escalator. Watch long enough and they eventually give way to other people, other images, including the late queen, painted with rigid precision on a damask couch with her favourite corgi. Suddenly, the painting appears to move, very slightly. The corgi twitches one ear.
The National Portrait Gallery (NPG) has come alive, after three years of closure and many more of shadows and stasis. Its temporary exhibitions came and went, almost always superb – Russian portraits, Elizabethan miniatures, Picasso, Cézanne, Freud – but corners of its permanent collection were too often deserted. Now everything (literally) has changed.
