The Courtauld Gallery announces 2025 exhibition programme

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The Courtauld Gallery announced today its programme of exhibitions and displays for 2025.

In the spring, Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection will present a remarkable group of works from the Oskar Reinhart Collection ‘Am Römerholz’, Winterthur, Switzerland. Beginning with major paintings by predecessors of the Impressionists, including Goya, Géricault and Courbet, the exhibition’s main focus will be on Reinhart’s extraordinary collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works. Highlights include Manet’s celebrated painting Au Café, Toulouse-Lautrec’s Clown Cha-U-Kao, a group of exceptional works by Cézanne, and a pair of paintings by Van Gogh of the hospital where he stayed in Arles. This is the first time ever that the collection has been shown outside Switzerland.

Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams will bring together some of the most groundbreaking sculpture of the 20th century. Working in the 1960s, a seminal moment in 20th century art, Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), Eva Hesse (1936-1970) and Alice Adams (b.1935) created distinctly soft, sensuous and abstract forms that explored the body, using new and unexpected materials such as flesh-coloured latex, netting and industrial wire. These extraordinary works fuse eroticism and humour in a playful and visceral challenge to established ideas about modernist form and minimalist geometric order. In the Drawings Gallery, Louise Bourgeois: Drawings from the 1960s will reveal the central role of drawing in the work of this important artist and the way these exuberant and highly colourful works on paper intertwined with her sculptural practice during those years.

In the autumn, The Courtauld Gallery will present Wayne Thiebaud. American Still Life, the first-ever museum exhibition of his work to be staged in the UK. 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 United States in the early 1960s for his vibrant and lushly painted still lifes of quintessentially post-war American subjects, from diner food and deli counters to gumball dispensers and pinball machines. Thiebaud transformed these everyday objects into the stuff of profound modern painting.

Other exhibitions in 2025 will include Henri Michaux. Mescaline Drawings, presented in the Drawings Gallery. These unique works by Henri Michaux (1899-1984), the Franco-Belgian poet and visual artist, stemmed from an experiment he started in 1955 to investigate the creative effects of psychedelic drugs, especially mescaline, a product derived from the Mexican peyote cactus.

Displays in the Project Space will include With Graphic Intent, the presentation of a group of German and Austrian modernist works on paper by artists including Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Oskar Kokoschka, followed by Post-War Abstraction: Works from The Courtauld, featuring abstract works from the 1950s and 1960s Europe and America by artists including Philip Guston, Jean Dubuffet and Joseph Beuys.

The Courtauld Gallery is also delighted to host a significant number of important paintings from The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, which will go on view for an extended display from May 2025, while The Barber undergoes a major refurbishment project. The selection features important works by Frans Hals, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

The Courtauld 2025 Exhibition Programme

Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries

Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection
14 Feb – 26 May 2025
Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries

The Oskar Reinhart Collection in Switzerland is one of the most remarkable art museums of its kind, ranging from superlative old master paintings and drawings to an exceptional group of Impressionist art. Assembled in the first half of the 20th century by the collector Oskar Reinhart (1885-1965), the collection was fully opened to the public in 1970 in his beautiful villa ‘Am Römerholz’ in Winterthur, near Zurich, and is now a museum of the Swiss confederation.

For the first time in its history, a rich array of highlights from the collection will be displayed outside Switzerland, featuring major paintings by artists of the generation preceding the Impressionists, such as Goya, Géricault and Courbet, but with a focus on Reinhart’s extraordinary collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works. At its heart will be some of the greatest paintings of these movements, including Manet’s groundbreaking depiction of modern life Au Café, Toulouse-Lautrec’s striking representation of the female performer Clown Cha-U-Kao, and an exceptional group of six works by Cezanne. A further highlight is the pair of famous paintings by Van Gogh depicting the courtyard and a ward of the hospital in Arles, where he returned to paint after spending time there as a patient. The Reinhart collection has close affinities with that of The Courtauld, which provides the perfect context to stage this unprecedented exhibition.

Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams
20 June – 14 Sept 2025
Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries

This major exhibition of Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, and Alice Adams at The Courtauld Gallery foregrounds 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 groundbreaking New York exhibition Eccentric Abstraction. Prior to the emergence of the women’s movement, these artists engaged with a feminist politics of the body with their visceral, playful, and abstract forms in materials such as latex, expanding foam, string, and plaster. As Lippard later reflected, ‘I can see now that I was looking for “feminist art”.

This is the first time The Courtauld will be staging an ambitious group exhibition of this kind, with three-dimensional works suspended from the ceiling and abstract sculpture filling the gallery spaces in bold and unconventional ways. Abstract Erotic features important loans from distinguished public and private collections in Europe and America, many of which are rarely loaned. Alongside iconic 20th century artists Bourgeois and Hesse, the exhibition celebrates Alice Adams, whose extraordinary sculptural works of the 1960s are of equivalent power and originality. This is the first exhibition of her work in the UK and the first ever in a museum context.

Wayne Thiebaud. American Still Life
10 Oct 2025 – 18 Jan 2026
Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries

Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021) is now considered to be one of the greatest and most original American artists of the 20th century. Over the course of his long life, working mainly in Sacramento, California, Thiebaud developed a unique style of painting to express his vision of modern American subjects. This exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery is the first ever museum show of his work in the UK. It presents Thiebaud’s vibrant and lushly painted still lifes of quintessentially post-war American subjects, from diner food and deli counters to gumball dispensers and pinball machines. These are the paintings with which Thiebaud made his name in the United States in the early 1960s. Thiebaud considered the everyday objects of American life to be a vital subject for contemporary art, and he saw his work as continuing the radical legacy of earlier still-life paintings by Chardin, Manet, Cézanne and others. Thiebaud believed in the importance of commonplace objects that might otherwise be overlooked or considered kitsch. His work turns hot dogs, lemon meringue pies and glossy cream cakes into the stuff of profound modern painting.

The exhibition features rarely lent works from major museum collections in the USA, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as the Wayne Thiebaud Foundation.

Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery

Henri Michaux. The Mescaline Drawings
12 Feb – 4 June 2025
Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery

This exhibition celebrates the unique Mescaline Drawings by the Franco-Belgian poet and visual artist, Henri Michaux (1899 -1984). In January 1955, as part of an experiment prompted by his publisher, Michaux, who was then 56 years old, tried the psychedelic drug mescaline, a product derived from the Mexican peyote cactus. The aim of the experiment was to investigate the effect of this type of non-addictive drug on the creative act. Michaux considered these experiences to be a portal into the inner workings of the mind.

The investigation transformed Michaux’s artistic life and provoked an outpouring of writings and distinctive drawings during the 1950s and 1960s, the latter being at the centre of this exhibition. Created after the effects of mescaline (and at times other drugs such as hashish, LSD, and psilocybin) had passed, the drawings are the astonishing transcriptions of the artist’s sensation, rendered as if by a sort of shuddering seismograph. This display, which presents works rarely seen in the UK, will showcase Michaux’s extraordinary experience, one that pushed the limits of what the essence of drawing is.

Louise Bourgeois: Drawings from the 1960s
20 June – 14 Sept 2025
Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery

For celebrated artist 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 by Bourgeois from the 1960s illustrates the central role of drawing in her work and the way it intertwined with her sculptural practice during those years. Abstract shapes, predominantly round and colourful, occupy small and large sheets of paper. ‘Drawings are thought feathers’ Bourgeois said, ‘ideas that I seize in mid-flight and put down on paper’. Drawn in rhythmic movements, these drawings reflect the spontaneity of Bourgeois’s mark-making and reveal an artist who was less concerned with making a perfect, finished product, but rather with the immediacy of the experience. For Bourgeois, the abstract drawings ‘come from a deep need to achieve peace, rest, and sleep. They relate to unconscious memories.’

Project Space

With Graphic Intent
1 March – 22 June 2025
Project Space

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, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Oskar Kokoschka. Presenting a broad variety of techniques, from the highly crafted to the visceral and ranging from portraits and narrative subjects to abstract works that exploit the possibilities of pure line and gestural mark-making, these works emerged from a cultural context in which the graphic arts were no longer considered merely preparatory sketches or cheap populist alternatives to high art.

Conceived as complete, self-contained works of art in themselves, the display demonstrates the artists’ commitment to using the inherent material properties of the graphic arts to communicate complex ideas around issues including gender conflict, metaphysics, politics and attitudes towards tradition and innovation.

Post-War Abstraction: Works from The Courtauld
2 July – 12 Oct 2025
Project Space

Drawn from The Courtauld’s significant collection of post-war art, this Project Space 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. Many of these works formed part of the recent Karshan gift to the Courtauld Gallery.

Katja and Nicolai Tangen 20th Century Gallery

The Barber in London: Highlights from a Remarkable Collection
Opening 23 May

A significant selection of exceptional paintings from The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, will go on view at The Courtauld Gallery for an extended display from May 2025, while The Barber undergoes a major refurbishment project. The Barber and The Courtauld were both founded in 1932 as university galleries, designed to encourage the study and public appreciation of art. Today, they house two of the finest collections of European art in the UK.

Highlights from the collection at The Barber include important works such as Frans Hals’s Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull (c. 1610-14), Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s Portrait of Countess Golovina (1797-1800), Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Blue Bower (1865), and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Woman in a Garden (1890). In addition, a handful of paintings with strong links to The Courtauld’s own collection will be embedded in the permanent collection displays, among them Joshua Reynolds’s monumental double portrait Maria Marow Gideon and her brother William (1786-87).

Tickets for Goya to Cezanne: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection go on sale in autumn 2024.

Tickets for other exhibitions at The Courtauld in 2025 go on sale next year. Sign up to The Courtauld Gallery newsletter to find out about our latest announcements, exhibitions, events and more. courtauld.ac.uk/stay-in-touch/

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The Courtauld Lates
17 Jan 2025; 14 Feb 2025; 23 May 2025; 20 June 2025; 12 Sept 2025; 10 Oct 2025
The Courtauld Gallery

The Courtauld Gallery will be open for late-night access until 22:30 on the first and last Friday of each of its temporary exhibitions as part of its Courtauld Lates series – giving visitors the chance to enjoy an evening of world-class art, cocktails, music, and performances surrounded by The Courtauld’s collection of masterpieces at Somerset House. Tickets to be announced soon.

Book now for The Courtauld Lates: Monet and London