Twelve of Bob Dylan’s pastels will be displayed at an exhibition entitled, ‘Bob Dylan: Face Value’ at the National Portrait Gallery this autumn.

Alongside his five decade career as one of history’s most revered and influential poets and musicians, Dylan has maintained a secondary career in visual arts, which entered the public eye in 1994, when a collection of his drawings, ‘Drawn Blank’ was published. Since then, he has exhibited his paintings in Milan, New York and Denmark. ‘Bob Dylan: Face Value’ will be his first public exhibition in the United Kingdom.

The gallery state that the twelve portraits, ‘represent characters, with an amalgamation of features Dylan has collected from life, memory and his imagination and fashioned into people, some real and some fictitious.’

Dylan’s work has been well received by art critics, with art historian John Elderfield, who was a driving force behind the exhibition, describing the pastels as, ‘products of the same extraordinary, inventive imagination, the same mind and eye, by the same story-telling artist’.

The works shown at the exhibition will also be represented in print, in the volume ‘Bob Dylan: Face Value: Character Sketches’, due for release on September 2nd.

Having released his thirty-fifth studio album, ‘Tempest’, last year, Dylan will tour Europe this winter, with the following nine dates in the UK in November:

November 18-20th: Clyde Auditorium: Glasgow.
November 22-24th: Blackpool Opera House, Blackpool.
November 26-28th: Royal Albert Hall, London.

‘Bob Dylan: Face Value’ will occupy the Contemporary Collection at the National Portrait Gallery from 24th August until 5th January 2014.