Charli xcx portrait added to National Portrait Gallery collection

Pop star is celebrated as ‘one of the defining cultural figures of her generation’ by gallery, which acquires Brat-era portrait by Harley Weir

A portrait of Charli xcx has been added to the National Portrait Gallery’s collection, in the week that she hopes for a No 1 chart position for her new album Music, Fashion, Film.

The photograph by Harley Weir was taken in 2023 and became one of the key images associated with Charli’s Brat era: the 2024 album that became a pop cultural phenomenon for its candour and debauchery.

Brandei Estes, the National Portrait Gallery’s senior curator of photographs, said the gallery was “delighted” with the acquisition. Charli is “one of the defining cultural figures of her generation”, she said, and Weir “has developed a distinctive photographic language that combines intimacy with a powerful sense of presence”.

The photo is exhibited in the gallery’s History Makers Now space, and its acquisition was funded by a gift from the Bukhman Foundation.

Charli’s album Music, Fashion, Film has been a critical and commercial success since its release on Friday, with the Guardian describing her as “our most consistently bracing pop star” in a five-star review . It could become her fourth UK No 1 and second this year, after her soundtrack to Wuthering Heights topped the chart in February. It is at No 1 in the midweek chart ahead of new releases by Snow Patrol, Shania Twain and the Strokes.

Over the weekend she released three additional songs not included on Music, Fashion, Film, described as B-sides of the album tracks, and titled I Keep on Thinking Bout You Every Single Day and Night, Playboy Bunny and If You Take Away the Music Then What Has She Got? “I felt adamant I wouldn’t put them on streaming because it sort of felt counterintuitive to the whole ethos of those songs, but I know you all really wanted them so I’ve begrudgingly put them on iTunes lol,” she said on Instagram.

One song from the album, Camera, documents Charli’s recent forays into film acting: she has recently appeared in the Polish arthouse drama Erupcja, the fantastical 100 Nights of Hero, and opposite Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Evans in Sacrifice, plus she starred as herself in the mockumentary The Moment.

She’ll next be seen in Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex, comedy thriller The Gallerest, and the remake of 1978 horror movie Faces of Death. She is starring in and producing the untitled next film by Takashi Miike, the Japanese director of Audition and Ichi the Killer.

Her next major live shows are headlining the Reading and Leeds festival, before a North American tour in September and October.