Good Morning, Midnight
with The Courtauld Institute of Art
at The Courtauld Gallery

This summer, we are excited to collaborate for the first time with The Courtauld in developing and staging a public exhibition in the Courtauld Gallery, to be conceived and curated by the students on the MA Curating the Art Museum programme.

As a culmination of the twelve-month programme, students work with public collections to devise a theme for an exhibition, select works from the collections, and design and mount the exhibition, along with a related programme of events.

Good Morning, Midnight will showcase The Courtauld's rich Post-Impressionist collection, with highlights by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Georges Seurat, in dialogue with contemporary artists from the David and Indrė Roberts Collection, including Anthony Cudahy, Louise Giovanelli, Celia Hempton, Prem Sahib and Rose Wylie.

The exhibition takes its title from a 1939 modernist novel by Jean Rhys in which a woman, alienated and lonely, traverses the cafés and bars of Paris. Central to the exhibition is Toulouse-Lautrec’s painting In a Private Dining Room (At the Rat Mort), where electric light illuminates the space with a strange, green glow. The painting sets the tone for the exhibition’s exploration of performance, spectacle and social space at night-time.

In the featured works from the David and Indrė Roberts Collection, artists use light as a tool to create atmosphere, and often zoom in and crop their compositions, fragmenting the body as they capture fleeting encounters across bars, clubs, stages and screens.

Kate Davies, Director of RIA, said: “This collaboration goes to the heart of RIA’s mission as stewards of the David and Indrė Roberts Collection. We work to make the collection more publicly accessible so are delighted to be opening it up to The Courtauld’s MA students to research and interrogate. This partnership is also an opportunity for us bring new perspectives on the collection and fresh readings of it in dialogue with The Courtauld’s superlative collection. I am excited to see what the students develop.”

Martin Caiger-Smith, Head of the MA Curating the Art Museum at The Courtauld, said: “We are thrilled to enter into this new collaboration. RIA is an exemplary organisation, with a superb collection of contemporary art that complements and extends The Courtauld’s own collection. The annual MA Curating exhibition is a highlight of our programme this summer. Students are privileged to work with art of this calibre, and we wait the exhibition this summer with keen anticipation.”