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The Courtauld Gallery today announced its programme of exhibitions and displays for 2027, which will include the first exhibition devoted to the remarkable Ghost Ranch, New Mexico landscapes of pioneering American artist Georgia O’Keeffe; the most comprehensive presentation of Paula Rego’s ground-breaking Dog Woman series since it was first exhibited over 30 years ago; and a showcase of four artists who transformed British art and the practice of landscape watercolour: Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), John Constable (1776-1837), Thomas Girtin (1775-1802) and John Sell Cotman (1782-1842).
2027 EXHIBITIONS
Paula Rego: Dog Woman
5 February – 23 May 2027
Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries
This will be the first retrospective exhibition dedicated to the groundbreaking series of pastels created by Paula Rego (1935-2022) between 1994-95. Among the artist’s most striking, sensual and unsettling works, the large-scale Dog Woman pastels revolutionised the way in which women are represented. They also cemented Rego’s reputation as one of the most radical and influential artists of our time.
These imposing works depict monumental, physically powerful women, tightly framed in stripped-down settings. Rego said that their power was derived from channelling her own raw, undiluted feelings, squatting and posing in front of a mirror, ‘turning myself into an animal’. She also described these works as love stories, rendering the complex emotions of desire, longing, rage, and submission. ‘In these pictures every woman’s a dog woman, not downtrodden but powerful. To be bestial is good.’
The Dog Woman series was the first Rego made using pastel, the medium she became renowned for. Combining the attributes of painting and drawing, pastel was well suited to an artist known for her extraordinary command of line who considered herself a ‘drawer’ rather than a painter. With this series, Rego also began working with Lila Nunes, who became the artist’s main model and collaborator for the following three decades.
Rego’s exploration of the animal within the human charted new territories and catapulted Rego into the most prolific and critically acclaimed period of her life. The exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery will be the first to reassess the significance of one of Rego’s most important projects and its pivotal role in her practice. It will include works that have not been seen publicly in the UK since the 1990s.
The exhibition will be accompanied by Paula Rego: Pendle Witches on display in the Project Space.
The exhibition is supported by The Paula Rego Exhibition Circle.
Turner and the Landscape Generation: Journeys in Watercolour
18 June – 5 September 2027
Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries
This exhibition explores the work of four ground-breaking British artists. Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), John Constable (1776-1837), Thomas Girtin (1775-1802) and John Sell Cotman (1782-1842) were part of a pioneering generation who transformed British art and the practice of landscape watercolour. All born within a few years of each other, this remarkable quartet underwent the same professional training and frequented the same sketching clubs, the birthplace of enduring friendships and rivalries. Featuring masterpieces from the Courtauld Gallery alongside loans from major UK collections, the exhibition will trace journeys taken by these four artists – such as Turner’s travels in Switzerland and Germany, Cotman’s tour of Yorkshire, Constable’s trips to the Lake District, and journeys made by Girtin, Turner and Cotman across Wales. The exhibition will chart how these artists placed landscape at the heart of their practice and made it the focus of British art.
Georgia O’Keeffe: Ghost Ranch
1 October 2027 – 30 January 2028
Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries
This is the first exhibition devoted to the remarkable landscapes produced by the celebrated American artist Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) at and around her home and studio at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico. These works, created over two decades from the mid 1930s to 1950s, form one of the most significant and original groups of landscape paintings of the 20th century, which transcend the conventions of the genre. Almost two dozen works will make up the exhibition, most of which have never been shown in the UK.
In 1929, O’Keeffe’s life and art underwent a dramatic change when she began spending time in the remote desert landscapes of northern New Mexico. Transfixed by its unique light, vast skies and rugged terrain, she returned for longer periods every year throughout the 1930s, deepening her connection to the region which would eventually become her home. In 1934 she discovered Ghost Ranch, a remote dude ranch in the high desert set amidst a dramatic landscape of red and yellow cliffs. Ghost Ranch became O’Keeffe’s centre in New Mexico; she rented a house there during subsequent summers before purchasing the Rancho de los Burros in 1940, creating a home and studio on the property.
The extraordinary terrain around Ghost Ranch became a major subject of O’Keeffe’s art over the following years. Her paintings depict the weathered rock formations surrounding the property and vast vistas of the looming flat-topped mountain, Cerro Pedernal, as well as visionary works featuring over-scaled flowers, bones, and skulls, which she collected from the desert ground.
There are no works by O’Keeffe in UK public collections and opportunities to see her paintings in this country are rare. The exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery will feature major loans from US institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, as well as an outstanding group of works from the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe.
The exhibition will be accompanied by Georgia O’Keeffe: Photographs at Ghost Ranch in the Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery.
The exhibition has lead support from the Huo Family Foundation.
2027 DISPLAYS
Drawing in the Age of Bruegel: New Discoveries
5 February – 16 May 2027
Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery
This display from the Courtauld Gallery’s collection brings together an exceptional selection of drawings by Flemish artists of the 16th and early 17th centuries, revealing the extraordinary creativity, technical skill and observational power that shaped one of Europe’s most influential artistic periods. Among this group of artists, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1526/27–1569) stands as a pivotal figure in the evolution of the landscape tradition. His drawings are renowned for their sweeping panoramas and elevated viewpoints, while his scenes of daily life present the world as both keenly observed and imaginatively ordered.
Coinciding with the publication of a major new collection catalogue devoted to the Courtauld’s Flemish drawings, which presents for the first time the results of extensive behind-the-scenes research, the display offers fresh insights into these remarkable drawings, including the latest technical analysis. Using cutting-edge imaging and scientific examination, researchers have uncovered new evidence about the materials and working practices that shaped this vibrant artistic tradition. Visitors will discover how drawings functioned as tools of invention and experimentation, and how new research continues to shape our understanding of these works.
Paula Rego: Pendle Witches
5 February – 23 May 2027
Project Space
The display focuses on a suite of etchings and aquatint prints titled Pendle Witches, which Paula Rego (1935–2022) executed in 1996, inspired by poems by the writer Blake Morrison (b. 1950). Morrison’s poems blend private, domestic themes and everyday situations with references to major events, including disquieting murder cases and ecological threats. At the time of the making of the Pendle Witches, Rego and Morrison were close friends, as Morrison has said, ‘because we were exploring similar issues in our work – grief, violence, misogyny, sexuality, the knowingness or otherwise of children’. Yet, far from being illustrations of Morrison’s poems, Rego drew inspiration from them to create her own stories.
The title relates to the notorious trial of the Pendle Witches in 1612 in Lancashire which led to the execution of eight women and two men accused of witchcraft. Women are the protagonists of the Pendle Witches series. From sexual awakening and sisterly companionship to the experience of violence and natural disaster, they imaginatively render a range of vicissitudes and hint at inner as much as outer turmoil.
The sharp narrative deployed by the poems is effectively rendered through the techniques of etching and sugar lift aquatint, by scratching and biting the plates to create highly textured, high-contrast images.
Rubens: The Master and his Workshop
26 May – 12 September 2027
Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery
Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) presided over one of the most dynamic artistic workshops of 17th century Europe, with drawing at the centre of his practice. For Rubens, draughtsmanship was a way of thinking: rapid pen sketches capture the first stirrings of complex compositional scenes, while chalk studies reveal his research into anatomical studies and his mastery of light and volume. The influence of classical sculpture on his art shows how he fused observation, memory and invention. In his celebrated portrait of the young Helena Fourment, the artist carefully defined the delicate features and ornate dress of his second wife through a subtle and confident use of red, black and white chalks.
Rubens’s prolific output, international reputation and dynamic technical skills influenced many artists who learnt directly from the master or were inspired by him. Selected from the Courtauld’s collection, this display will showcase some of their works, including drawings by Anthony van Dyck, Jacques Jordaens and Abraham van Diepenbeeck. Together, these drawings illuminate a creative community defined by exchange, experimentation and the continual reworking of ideas that helped shape Baroque art across Europe.
Georgia O’Keeffe: Photographs at Ghost Ranch
1 October 2027 – 30 January 2028
Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery
This display will present around 20 photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe at her New Mexico home, drawn from photoshoots commissioned by Life Magazine from the famed photographers Philippe Halsman (1906-1979) and John Loengard (1934-2020) in 1948 and 1966, respectively. Featuring previously unpublished photographs and rare colour images, the display will give visitors an added sense of the extraordinary, vast landscapes around Ghost Ranch and of O’Keeffe’s life there, while offering insights into how her image was presented and marketed.
Vanessa Bell: A Rediscovery
October 2027 – February 2028
Project Space
An important new addition to the Courtauld’s leading collection of art by the Bloomsbury Group will go on display in October 2027. Previously unknown and not seen in public in over a century, this pair of painted wooden panels, attributed to Vanessa Bell (1879 – 1961), was made at the Omega Workshops in London between 1913 and 1916. The Omega Workshops were a collective of avant-garde artists who made and sold experimental domestic wares, including painted wooden furniture, textiles, rugs and ceramics, and had a significant influence on artists of the 20th century.
Originally the doors of a wardrobe, the panels feature two stylised female figures wearing the style of dresses sold at the Omega from the middle of 1915. Acquired the year the Omega Workshops closed in 1919, they have remained in the same family ever since and have been generously donated to the Courtauld, where they have undergone a major conservation project.
Courtauld Commission 2026: Ella Walker
From 3 September 2026
The John Browne Entrance Hall and Ticketing Hall
Artist Ella Walker (b.1993) has created two new site-specific commissions for The John Browne Entrance Hall and the Ticketing Hall of the Courtauld Gallery, which are free to visit.
Walker’s monumental canvases, The Studio and Verdaccio Wall, draw on iconography, costume and poses observed in Gothic sculpture and Renaissance painting, as well as popular culture, to conjure scenes that flicker mysteriously across time periods. Walker’s work revels in the interplay between drawing and painting, with graphite often left visible and paint used to produce delicate lines. Her paintings possess a matt, chalky quality that is evocative of fresco – a type of wall and ceiling painting made on wet plaster.
This is the second Courtauld Commission, a series of annual commissions by contemporary artists for the Courtauld Gallery, which launched in 2025 with new works by artist Rachel Jones.
MA Curating exhibition
18 June – 28 September 2027
Project Space
A new exhibition curated by the Courtauld Institute’s MA Curating students will open at the Courtauld Gallery in summer 2027.
MA Curating at the Courtauld offers an unmatched opportunity for students to immerse themselves in the theory and practice of curating in a unique scholarly and professional context. Further details to be announced next year.
The programme of displays in the Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery is generously supported by the International Music and Art Foundation, with additional support from James Bartos.
Courtauld Members get free unlimited entry to all exhibitions, access to presale tickets, priority booking to selected events, advance notice of art history short courses, exclusive events, discounts and more. Join at courtauld.ac.uk/members.
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2027 Highlights
