Thursday, 5 September 2024

The Courtauld Gallery

 


Discover our 2025 exhibitions and displays

The Courtauld Gallery's 2025 exhibitions and displays

Temporary exhibitions


Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 – 1901), The Clowness Cha-U-Kao, 1895

Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart collection

14 Feb – 26 May 2025 

A remarkable group of works from the Oskar Reinhart Collection ‘Am Römerholz’, Winterthur, will be on loan for the first time outside Switzerland.

Featuring major paintings by artists including Goya, Géricault and Courbet, the exhibition’s main focus will be on Reinhart’s extraordinary Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collection. Highlights include Manet’s groundbreaking painting Au Café, Toulouse-Lautrec’s Clown Cha-U-Kao, a group of exceptional works by Cezanne, and a pair of paintings by van Gogh of the hospital where he stayed in Arles.

Tickets on sale later this year. Friends go free.


Eva Hesse (1936-1970), Untitled (Three Nets), 1966, private collection © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Collection Services

Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams

20 June – 14 Sept 2025 

This major exhibition will foreground these artists’ shared commitment to using humour and abstract form to ask important questions about sexuality and bodies. The influential critic and curator Lucy Lippard dubbed this kind of work ‘abstract erotic’, and in 1966, Bourgeois, Hesse, and Adams were the only women artists included in Lippard’s ground-breaking exhibition Eccentric Abstraction.

This ambitious group exhibition is the first of its kind at The Courtauld, with three-dimensional works suspended from the ceiling and abstract sculpture filling the gallery in bold and unconventional ways.

Tickets on sale in 2025. Friends go free.


Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021), Cakes, 1963, oil on canvas, Gift in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art from the Collectors Committee, the 50th Anniversary Gift Committee, and The Circle, with Additional Support from the Abrams Family in Memory of Harry N. Abrams © Wayne Thiebaud/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2024

Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life

10 Oct 2025 – 18 Jan 2026

Considered to be one of the greatest and most original American artists of the 20th Century, Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021) made his name in the US in the early 1960s. Known for his remarkable, vibrant and lushly painted still lifes of quintessentially post-war American subjects, from diner food and deli counters to gumball dispensers and pinball machines, he transformed these everyday objects into the stuff of profound modern painting.  

This is the first-ever museum exhibition of Thiebaud’s work to be staged in the UK. 

Tickets on sale in 2025. Friends go free.


Drawings Gallery displays


Henri Michaux (1899-1984), Untitled (Mescaline drawing), 1957, pen and black ink on paper, 32cm x 24cm, Promised gift by Linda Karshan in memory of her husband, Howard Karshan. On long-term loan to The Courtauld Gallery, London © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2023

Henri Michaux. The Mescaline Drawings

12 Feb - 4 June 2025 

In 1955, as part of an experiment prompted by his publisher, the Franco-Belgian poet and visual artist, Henri Michaux (1899 -1984), tried the psychedelic drug mescaline to investigate the effect of this type of non-addictive drug on the creative act.

This display will present the unique Mescaline Drawings - works rarely seen in the UK - and will showcase Michaux’s extraordinary experience, one that pushed the limits of what the essence of drawing is.

Included with Gallery entry.


Louise Bourgeois (1911 - 2010), Untitled, 1968, Watercolor on paper, 48.3 x 62.9 cm, Photo: Christopher Burke, © The Easton Foundation / Licensed by DACS, UK and VAGA at ARS, NY

Louise Bourgeois: Drawings from the 1960s 

20 June - 14 Sept 2025

For Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) drawing was like an intimate journal, a practice that began when she was young, and remained a constant element of her artistic life. This group of works from the 1960s illustrates the central role of drawing in her work and the way it intertwined with her sculptural practice during those years.

This display will be shown alongside Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse and Alice Adams.

Included with Gallery entry.


Project Space displays


Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Untitled, 1916, Brush and India ink on paper. The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust). Gift by Linda Karshan in memory of her husband, Howard Karshan. photo © The Courtauld

With Graphic Intent

1 March – 22 June 2025

This focused display of German and Austrian modernist works on paper, including pencil and ink drawings, lithographs, woodblock prints and etchings, showcases The Courtauld’s holdings of some of the best-known artists from the period including Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Oskar Kokoschka. 

Included with Gallery entry.


Post-War Abstraction: Works from The Courtauld 

2 July – 12 Oct 2025

Drawn from our significant collection of post-war art, this display will examine forms of abstraction which emerged in the 1950s and 1960s in Europe and America. It will explore the radical approaches towards non-representational image making and experimentation with techniques and materials that characterized the work of artists including Philip Guston, Jean Dubuffet and Joseph Beuys.

Included with Gallery entry.

Philip Guston (1913-1980), Close-Up II, 1959 Oil paint on paper, mounted on board, mounted on masonite, 59 x 73.6 cm. Promised gift by Linda Karshan in memory of her husband, Howard Karshan. On long-term loan to The Courtauld Gallery, London. © The Estate of Philip Guston, courtesy Hauser & Wirth

20th Century Gallery

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842), Countess Golovina, 1797-1800, oil on canvas,

The Barber in London: Highlights from a Remarkable Collection 

From 23 May 2025

A selection of exceptional paintings from The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, will go on view at The Courtauld for an extended display, while The Barber undergoes a major refurbishment project. Highlights include works by artists including Frans Hals, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Included with Gallery entry,


A man looks at a drawing in the gallery

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