The Courtauld Gallery

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• Panel discussion with Frieze Masters director Emanuela Tarizzo and Spotlight section curators Sofia Gotti and Devika Singh Research-led curating in an art fair context Panel discussion with Frieze Masters director Emanuela Tarizzo and Spotlight section curators Sofia Gotti and Devika Singh This event is now fully booked. Should you need any assistance with your booking, please email researchforum@courtauld.ac.uk Held on occasion of the upcoming edition of the Frieze Masters fair (14-18 October 2026), the panel discussion will offer the opportunity to discover some of the highlights of this year’s Spotlight section. With a particular emphasis on art from across the Global South, the section will be the largest to date since its inception in 2012. The curated section will bring together solo presentations of artists working in the 20th century, with a focus on pioneering artists active in Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, North and West Africa and across Asia. Spotlight will explore new research into these figures and showcase works produced between the 1950s and the late 1970s. While some artists have become established figures in their places of work, their art remains rarely seen in London. The event will begin with an introduction to Frieze Masters by director Emanuela Tarizzo, followed by presentations by Spotlight section curators Sofia Gotti and Devika Singh. We will conclude with a conversation exploring the challenges and opportunities of presenting pioneering international artists within the context of an art fair. Among the questions that will be considered are: how do art historical and curatorial frameworks help address disparities of knowledge about artists? How can art fairs function as sites of research, knowledge exchange and critical inquiry? And how can they be part of broader ecologies of support among artists, scholars, curators, and galleries? Organised by Dr Sofia Gotti, Lecturer in Curating, the Courtauld and Dr Devika Singh, Senior Lecturer in Curating, the Courtauld
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  Research-led curating in an art fair context

  Until 18 Oct 2026

  
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• Modern Painting from the Courtauld and Reuben Collections features a selection of outstanding works by Cézanne, Modigliani, Léger, Picasso, Magritte, and others. Highlights on display include early 20th century paintings from the Courtauld’s collection, including Paul Cezanne’s Turning Road (1905), a landscape conjured through near-abstract patches of colour, and Amedeo Modigliani’s Nude (c.1916), a painting that upended conventional approaches to the subject of the female nude. These set the stage for works from the Reuben Collection by artists who charted new directions, including Cubist paintings by Fernard Léger and Man Ray’s monumental Black Widow [Earlier titled Invention-Nativity and Nativity ], 1915, last exhibited in the UK more than 50 years ago A group of paintings by Pablo Picasso, including two portraits of his partners, Portrait of a Woman ( Marie-Thérèse in a Blue Beret), 1937, and Head of a Woman (Dora Maar), 1939, will be shown alongside his remarkable Still Life with Basket of Fruits and Flowers (1942). The Reuben Collection holds a significant collection of works by the Surrealist artist René Magritte, including L’empire des lumières (The Dominion of Light) and L’ami intime (The Intimate Friend). Both date from the 1950s and are characteristically elusive juxtapositions that offer the promise of new and unexpected meanings.
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  Modern Painting from the Courtauld and Reuben Collections

  Until 10 Jan 2027

  
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• The first solo exhibition in Europe of the celebrated 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 19 of the artist’s most iconic, thought-provoking and at times humorous paintings, never-before-seen in Britain, that represent people in shared moments of friendship and love, as well as experiencing solitude and alienation. While Toor’s figures and scenes are fictional, they are rooted in his personal experiences and memories. Speaking of his works, he says they “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 and admiration for the Old Masters, in particular Baroque and 18th century painting, and the Courtauld is a museum he particularly enjoys. 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.
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  Salman Toor: Someone Like You

  Until 10 Jan 2027

  
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• For Salman Toor (b.1983), drawing is an integral part of his 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. Toor has said that drawing someone is a way of connecting, ‘like praying for someone, or thinking about them, creating a fantasy of them’.
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  Salman Toor: Drawings

  Until 10 Jan 2027

  
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• Discover an overlooked innovator of the Bloomsbury group, Winifred Gill. 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.
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  Winifred Gill: A Bloomsbury Pioneer

  Until 20 Jan 2027

  
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