The Courtauld Gallery announces 2026 exhibition programme

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The Courtauld Gallery announced today its programme of exhibitions and displays for 2026.

The Griffin Catalyst Exhibition: Seurat and the Sea will be the first ever exhibition dedicated to the seascapes of the major French Post-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat (1859-1891). Due to his early death at the age of 31, Seurat left a small body of works and exhibitions devoted to him are rare. Opening 13 February 2026, this major exhibition will be the first devoted to Seurat in the UK in almost 30 years, reuniting 27 exceptional paintings, oil sketches and drawings that chart the evolution of Seurat’s radical style through the recurring motif of the sea.

Hepworth in Colour (12 June – 6 September 2026) will unite for the first time around 20 of Barbara Hepworth’s most significant sculptures with colour alongside 30 important drawings. The exhibition will be the first of its kind, exploring Hepworth’s lifelong fascination with colour and providing a unique opportunity for visitors to discover the role of colour in the work of one of the most influential sculptors of the 20^th century.

In the autumn, The Courtauld will present the first solo-exhibition in Europe of the acclaimed New York-based painter Salman Toor (b. 1983, Lahore). Toor’s iconic, thought-provoking and yet humorous paintings capture intimate moments of love and friendship as well experiences of solitude and alienation. Opening 2 October 2026, Salman Toor: Someone Like You will bring together notable canvases from major international collections along with a display of Toor’s striking drawings.

Displays in the Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery in 2026 will include landscape watercolours by women artists working in Britain and abroad between 1760 and 1860, and a display of prints created in London by artists including Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Paula Rego.

Also on display at The Courtauld until 28 June 2026 is The Barber in London: Highlights from a Remarkable Collection, a display of exceptional paintings from The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, featuring masterpieces by artists including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Frans Hals, JMW Turner, and Edgar Degas.

Two new site-specific commissions by acclaimed artist Rachel Jones (b. 1991) will also be on display in The John Browne Entrance Hall and Ticketing Hall of The Courtauld Gallery and will be free to visit.

Exhibitions

The Griffin Catalyst Exhibition: Seurat and the Sea
Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries
13 February – 17 May 2026
The Courtauld will present the first ever exhibition dedicated to the seascapes of the major French Post-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat (1859–1891). This ambitious exhibition will be the first devoted to Seurat in the UK in almost 30 years. It will chart the evolution of his radical and distinctive style through the recurring motif of the sea. It follows major Impressionist exhibitions at The Courtauld, such as Cézanne’s Card Players, The Morgan Stanley Exhibition: Van Gogh. Self-Portraits and, most recently, the acclaimed The Griffin Catalyst Exhibition: Monet and London. Views of the Thames, which was seen by a record 120,000 visitors.

The Courtauld holds the largest collection of works by Seurat in the UK. The artist is best known as the creator of the Neo-Impressionist technique, in which shapes and light are rendered by juxtaposing small dots of pure colour. Due to his early death at the age of 31, Seurat left a small body of work and exhibitions devoted to him are rare.

The exhibition will bring together 27 paintings, oil sketches and drawings from major private and public collections, made by Seurat during the five summers he spent on the northern coast of France, between 1885 and 1890. Working in port towns along the English Channel, including Honfleur, Port-en-Bessin and Gravelines, Seurat captured their seascapes and port activity in his distinctive Neo-Impressionist technique. He sought, in his words, ‘to wash his eyes of the days spent in the studio [in Paris] and to translate in the most faithful manner the bright clarity, in all its nuances’.

The exhibition’s title supporter is Griffin Catalyst, the civic engagement initiative of Citadel Founder and CEO Kenneth C. Griffin.

Hepworth in Colour
Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries
12 June – 6 September 2026
Barbara Hepworth (1903 –1975) is best known for her abstract sculptural forms inspired by nature and the rugged seaside landscapes of Cornwall, where she lived and worked. This ambitious exhibition will be the first to explore a less familiar aspect of her work: the artist’s lifelong fascination with colour, which she used in highly original and unexpected ways. The exhibition will unite for the first time her early innovative sculptures with colour of the 1940s, displayed alongside the most important drawings from that decade, and will include major examples of her work with colour from the 1950s and 1960s.

Discussing her pioneering use of colour in sculpture with her son-in-law, the art historian Alan Bowness, Hepworth stated ‘in a way my colour has been accepted, but never understood’.

This focused, research-driven exhibition will be comprised of around 20 sculptures and 30 exceptional drawings, showing sculpture in dialogue with her painted and graphic works.

At the heart of the exhibition is an extraordinary group of wood and stone carvings created in the 1940s, with vivid blues and yellows painted into hollows and onto curves. Many of these have never previously been shown together and include key works from public and private collections, including as far afield as Australia and Hong Kong.

Hepworth’s interest in colour continued across her career into the 1950s and 1960s, with her painterly bronze surfaces and surprising use of coloured marbles that expand the role of colour in sculpture and reflecting a more expressive painting and drawing practice.

Hepworth in Colour provides an exciting and unique opportunity to discover the vital and expressive role of colour in Hepworth’s sculpture, offering a fresh way of understanding one of the most remarkable artists of the 20th century.

The exhibition’s lead supporter is the Huo Family Foundation.

Salman Toor: Someone Like You
Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries
2 October 2026 – 10 January 2027
The first solo exhibition in Europe of the acclaimed New York-based painter Salman Toor.

The exhibition focuses on Salman Toor’s exploration of human interactions and the desire and struggle to experience a sense of belonging, both culturally and emotionally. The exhibition will bring together around 20 of the artist’s most iconic, thought-provoking and yet humorous paintings that represent people in shared moments of friendship and love, as well as experiencing solitude and alienation.

The characters that populate Toor’s painting are fictional but rooted in personal experiences and memories. Toor says that his paintings ‘depict queer and immigrant lives that straddle different cultures and inhabit the tension between intimacy and exposure, belonging and estrangement. What it means to find a community, but also the daily costs associated with visibility.’

Born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1983, Toor trained in the United States. He currently lives and works in New York. He has had major exhibitions internationally, including his acclaimed first institutional solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2020-21). More recently, he participated in the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2024). The Courtauld’s exhibition will be Toor’s first solo museum show in Europe.

Toor’s work is rooted in a deep engagement with the tradition of painting and The Courtauld Gallery is one of the museums he most admires. One of the principal works in the exhibition, The Bar on East 13th (2019), revisits The Courtauld’s celebrated painting by Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882).

The exhibition will be accompanied by a display of Toor’s drawings in the Gilbert & Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery. Showcasing Toor’s mastery of drawing and the way it informs his practice as a painter, the display will include Fag Puddle in Vitrine (2021), acquired by The Courtauld in 2024.

Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery

A View of One’s Own: Landscapes by British Women Artists, 1760-1860
Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery
28 January 2026 – 14 June 2026
A View of One’s Own showcases landscape drawings and watercolours by British women artists working between 1760 and 1860 whose work represents a growing area of The Courtauld’s collection.

These artists range from highly accomplished amateurs to those ambitious for more formal recognition. They have remained mostly unknown, and their works largely unpublished.

When the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, its members included two women, yet there would not be another female academician until Dame Laura Knight was elected in 1936. Despite this institutional exclusion, women artists in Britain continued to train, practice and exhibit during this period, particularly in the field of landscape watercolours.

This exhibition and its accompanying catalogue shed new light on these artists, working within a heavily male dominated era in the arts. Some of the artists achieved recognition during their lifetimes while others’ work remained private, until later discovered.

10 artists are featured in the exhibition. They include Harriet Lister and Lady Mary Lowther, who were among the first to depict the Lake District; Amelia Long, Lady Farnborough, one of the first British artists to travel to France following the Napoleonic Wars, and Elizabeth Batty – whose works appearing in the show were only rediscovered a few years ago.

Studio Prints: An artists’ workshop 
Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery
6 June – 13 September 2026
This display of prints by artists including Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Paula Rego celebrates the little-known story of the lively printmaking workshop established in London in 1968 by Dorothea Wight (1944-2013), who was later joined in 1974 by her future husband Marc Balakjian (1940-2017).

What had begun as a private workshop, created by Wight so that she could print her own works after leaving the Slade School of Art, soon transformed into a dynamic meeting place for artists, establishing Studio Prints as a legendary London printmaking workshop.

Coinciding with a resurgence of interest in printmaking in the 1960s and 1970s, Wight and Balakjian collaborated with artists such as Auerbach, Freud, Leon Kossoff, Rego, and Celia Paul, some of whom became close friends.

This display marks the recent acquisition of a group of proof impressions by these celebrated London-based artists, allocated to The Courtauld by HM Government under the Cultural Gifts Scheme.

The programme of displays in the Drawings Gallery is generously supported by the International Music and Art Foundation, with additional support from James Bartos.

Salman Toor: Drawings
Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery, Floor 1
2 Oct 2026 – 10 Jan 2027

‘Painting was something I learned when I moved from Pakistan to the United States, but drawing I always considered as second nature.’
Salman Toor (2022)

For Salman Toor (b.1983), drawing is an integral part of artistic life. To coincide with the exhibition Salman Toor: Someone Like You, this focused display of a substantial group of works on paper, made with ink, charcoal, and gouache, showcases the artist’s mastery of drawing and the way in which it informs his practice as a painter.

Having started drawing as a child, figure-drawing classes were a crucial part of Toor’s undergraduate training. Informed by his close study of art history, particularly of baroque works, Toor’s arresting drawings are characterised by his striking treatment of light as well as his rendering of real and implied movement to create pictures charged with a sense of dynamism and inner life.

Toor often works on variations of recurring motifs. Among the works included in this presentation are examples of his distinctive drawings of individuals and groups of figures at border control checks, as well as still-lifes such as Fag Puddle in Vitrine (2021), which capture the fascination and greed connected to histories of accumulation and plundering. At times, the artist has reworked historical paintings that especially affected him into new narratives and compositions, such as in his drawing Three Mascots (2023), after Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s grisaille The Three Soldiers (1568).

Although they are derived from his imagination, Toor’s drawings are often based on memories, especially the faces of friends and acquaintances; a recent example includes the portrait Turtleneck (2024). Toor has said that drawing someone is a way of connecting, ‘like praying for someone, or thinking about them, creating a fantasy of them’.

The programme of displays in the Drawings Gallery are generously supported by the International Music and Art Foundation, with additional support from James Bartos.

Project Space

The Painted Tower: Conservation in Context at Longthorpe
Project Space
26 February – 27 May 2026
This display offers an insight into The Courtauld’s current collaboration with English Heritage to conserve the remarkable 14^th-century wall paintings in Longthorpe Tower, Peterborough.

Drawing on material from our National Wall Paintings Survey archive, the display will showcase the pioneering role of The Courtauld’s Conservation Department in safeguarding Britain’s wall paintings and the peculiar challenges of caring for paintings attached to historic buildings.

Exploring the creation of Longthorpe’s exceptionally complete scheme of medieval decoration, the display will illuminate the ways in which wall paintings were influenced by other contemporary art forms and used to communicate with their audiences. Recounting the story of the scheme’s creation and rediscovery, we will examine the evolution of approaches to conserving wall paintings and demonstrate how an understanding of the paintings’ physical history helps inform their preservation into the future.

Hepworth and Nicholson: The Hampstead Studio Photographs
Project Space
6 Jun – 4 Oct 2026
Coinciding with The Courtauld’s major exhibition Hepworth in Colour, this display brings together a remarkable group of photographs of Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson’s London studio, taken in 1933 by Paul Laib (1869–1958).

The photographs, which are held in The Courtauld’s Conway Library, are among the most evocative and iconic studio images taken in Britain during the 20th century. Along with portraits of the two artists, the photographs show their shared studio at No. 7, Mall Studios in Hampstead – a space populated with sculptures, paintings and prints, arranged side-by-side with carving tools, plants and other studio objects.

This display will offer a captivating insight into Hepworth and Nicholson’s London studio environment, which they occupied during the 1930s before moving to St Ives in Cornwall. The photographs also stand as compelling works of art in their own right.

Winifred Gill: A Bloomsbury Pioneer
Project Space
14 October 2026 – 10 February 2027
This display will spotlight the artist Winifred Gill (1891-1981), through works held in The Courtauld’s collection. Although a gifted artist and a central figure at Roger Fry’s avant-garde Omega Workshops, Gill’s contributions have since remained largely overlooked. She studied at the Slade before joining the Workshops as a designer, maker and, for a time, business manager.

On display will be a number of Gill’s inventive toy designs for the Omega Workshops, as well as a remarkable still life painting made around this time that is deeply characteristic of the Bloomsbury style in its bold response to colour and form. Later prints will show how Gill’s style developed in the 1920s while working as a teacher of arts and crafts in the pioneering Bristol and Manchester University Settlements. Sketchbooks and printing materials will offer a deeper understanding of her practice.