Courtauld Institute

‘This painting makes me so happy,’ said my usually gallery-averse friend, pulling me over to Salman Toor’s ‘The Women’, on display in the painter’s first solo museum show in Europe, at the Courtauld Gallery. ‘We’ve had so many Sunday mornings like this.’ In the painting in front of us were three women slumped across a bed, each propping her head up with one arm. In our version, we’d probably be debriefing on the events of the night before. The painting is small, the room cosy and cocooned from the outside world in Toor’s characteristic velvety green, laid down in thick, parallel strokes of oil paint. At the dresser stands a boy. Toor has said that if he were to write a collection of stories, this image would be the first: ‘a coming-of-age moment for the boy experiencing a blossoming sense of self.’ Toor was born in Lahore, Pakistan, into a middle-class Muslim family. At 20, he moved to the US to study painting, and eventually settled in New York. It was there that he began painting the world that now fills his canvases: queer South Asian men drinking, dancing, flirting, scrolling, lying around with friends, falling in love and being alone. His figures aren’t portraits of real people, but they come from a world he knows. They occupy the sometimes uncomfortable territories between intimacy and exposure, belonging and estrangement. His work draws as much from the Old Masters and the traditions of Western painting as it does from the art history of Pakistan and South Asia,...

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