The Courtauld Gallery in London will open “Georgia O’Keeffe: Ghost Ranch” in October 2027, an exhibition of nearly two dozen works that explore how the American artist’s New Mexico property shaped her painting practice. Most of the works have never been exhibited in the U.K., according to the Guardian, which first reported the news. Only six of the roughly two dozen paintings in the exhibition have been previously exhibited in Britain, it revealed.
Ghost Ranch, a remote property in the high desert north of Santa Fe, became O’Keeffe’s summer home starting in 1934, when she began renting a room on the 21,000-acre estate before eventually purchasing it. “As soon as I saw it, that was my country,” she once said. “I’d never seen anything like it before, but it fitted to me exactly.”
Dr. Karen Serres, senior curator of paintings at the Courtauld, told the Guardian that O’Keeffe’s relationship to Ghost Ranch remains under-recognized in Britain despite its centrality to her work. “Ghost Ranch was such an important part of her life, and it illuminates a large part of her art in general,” Serres said, pointing to works like Red and Yellow Cliffs (1940) and Gerald’s Tree I (1937) as direct responses to the surrounding landscape.
The show also arrives against a history of uneven critical reception to O’Keeffe in the U.K. In 1993, a Hayward Gallery exhibition drew dismissive reviews from British critics, and more recently, the reception to her 2016 Tate Modern show was largely framed around disputing assumptions that her flower paintings depicted female genitalia. “She’s known as just this formidable female artist,” said Serres. “But actually seeing her work, understanding what she’s about, I don’t think we are there yet.”
The Courtauld exhibition follows a fresh wave of attention to O’Keeffe elsewhere. The Detroit Institute of Arts opens “Georgia O’Keeffe: Architecture” on September 11th, an exhibition of nearly 40 works examining her engagement with the built environment, from Manhattan skyscrapers to New Mexico adobe structures, anchored by Stables (1932), which is owned by the museum. On October 3rd, Hauser & Wirth inaugurates its new Palo Alto gallery with “Calder | O’Keeffe,” the first exhibition devoted to the artist’s decades-long friendship with Alexander Calder, developed with the Calder Foundation and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. A documentary about the artist, directed by Academy Award– and Emmy Award–winning filmmakers Paul Wagner and Ellen Casey Wagner, was also released earlier this year.
