Courtauld Institute

There’s something irresistably fascinating about seeing into artist’s studios – messy materials, stacks of canvases, and a peek behind the curtain into the work spaces for some of the world’s best creative minds. To coincide with the Courtauld’s major Barbara Hepworth exhibition, the gallery is running a companion show of photographs taken by Paul Laib offering a look inside Hepworth’s London studio that she shared with Ben Nicholson in the 1930s. 

In his latest paintings, Pakistan-born, New York-based artist Salman Toor explores the struggle and desire for belonging, both culturally and emotionally. Bringing together 19 of the artist’s paintings, some of which have never been seen in Britain before, this is Toor’s first solo exhibition in Europe and will be full of work deeply rooted in his personal experiences, as well as inspired by an admiration for the Old Masters, especially in Baroque and 18th-century painting. 

The Courtauld’s 2027 season kicks off with a Paula Rego exhibition focused on a series of sensual and unsettling pastel works exploring ‘the animal in the human’ that she created in the mid-nineties. The exhibition constitutes the most comprehensive display of these groundbreaking works since their creation, and will feature alongside a small display of etchings and aquatint prints from the British-Portugese artist’s Pendle Witches series, on view simultaneously in the gallery’s Project Space. 

Over the summer months, the Courtauld will host Turner and the Landscape Generation: Journeys in Watercolour, an exploration of the shared experiences, friendships and rivalries among British landscape artists JMW Turner, John Constable, Thomas Girtin and John Sell Cotman. They were the four pioneering artists that formed the core of the the so-called ‘Landscape Generation’, who together revolutionised British art in the late eighteenth century. Expect to see stunning watercolour depictions of Switzerland, Germany, Yorkshire, the Lake District and Wales. 

Georgia O’Keeffe spent two decades painting the landscapes around her home and studio at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico. In the end, she created almost two dozen works of the rugged, dramatic and vast terrain, most of which have never been shown in the UK. This exhibition will be the very first dedicated to those remarkable landscapes. It will be complimented by a display of photographs of the artist working at Ghost Ranch, originally commissioned by Life Magazine, in the Drawings Gallery