Discover our 2025 exhibitions and displays
Temporary exhibitions
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.
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: 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. 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: 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
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.
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,
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