Prospect Recommends: The best art exhibitions this month

The best galleries, exhibitions and other shows to see this month
July 13, 2016
Colour: The Art and Science of Illuminated ManuscriptsFitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 30th July to 30th December

Christian Boltanski, AnimitasJupiter Artland, Edinburgh, 31st July to 25th September

In 2009, Nicky and Robert Wilson launched Jupiter Artland just outside Edinburgh. It was an unconventional collection of outdoor sculpture commissioned from leading sculptors—from Anish Kapoor to Cornelia Parker. The 100 acres of woodland and meadows around their Jacobean Manor, together with indoor exhibition spaces, have hosted some of the most adventurous contemporary art north of the border. This summer they open the Edinburgh Festival season with a new permanent installation by the revered French artist Christian Boltanski, his first in the UK. Animitas is a cluster of hundreds of small Japanese bells attached to long stems, planted on an island within the Duck Pond, in a pattern that maps the stars on the night the artist was born, 6th September 1944. Boltanski will present two further ongoing works—including Les archives du cœur, a collection of recorded heartbeats.

Ron Arad’s Curtain Call The Roundhouse, London, 6th to 29th August

London’s Roundhouse is celebrating its 50th birthday with the Bloomberg sponsored summer season of cutting-edge music and performance. Refusing to grow old, it has invited the artist and designer Ron Arad to reinvent his 2011 work, Curtain Call—a cylinder of suspended silicon rods, within which a roll call of artists and musicians are invited to create new work.

An Amateur’s Passion: Lord Fitzwilliam’s Print Collection9th August to 29th January 2017

Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum  is 200 years old this year. Its major summer exhibition is a display of more than 150 illuminated manuscripts, dating from the 6th to the 16th centuries, once at the core of Viscount Fitzwilliam’s 1816 bequest. Besides his recently uncovered love for a French dancer, the Irish peer’s primary passion was collecting—exemplified here by the 40,000 prints gathered in his library.

 
Art