I Still Believe in Miracles: 30 years of Inverleith House Inverleith House, Edinburgh, 23rd July to 23rd October
The title of this exhibition, part of this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival, comes from a work Scottish artist Douglas Gordon created for Inverleith House in 2005. It reprised Gordon’s 1994 text piece “I believe in miracles”—but also gestured to the miracle that is Inverleith House: a bold contemporary art institution set in one of the world’s great botanical gardens. When Paul Nesbitt became Exhibitions Director in 1986, his brief was to curate shows of botanical art. Gradually, however, he began to include leading international and upcoming British artists, who were inspired by this 18th-century building and its setting. Andy Goldsworthy, Tina Modotti, Ed Ruscha, Richard Tuttle, Isa Genzken, Philip Guston, Richard Hamilton, Cy Twombly, Agnes Martin, Karla Black and Juergen Teller make up a formidable roll-call. This summer’s exhibition includes work by 30 artists—alongside displays of botanical drawings by John Hope (1725-86) and Hugh Cleghorn (1820-95).
William Eggleston Portraits National Portrait Gallery, 21st July to 23rd October
Inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, those masters of black-and-white documentary photography, in the 1960s the American William Eggleston began to explore the dye transfer colour printing process. A ground-breaking 1976 exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, introduced his careful, eccentric, mysteriously beautiful saturated colour photographs of ordinary people from the American South. This is the largest exhibition to date of portraits from his whole career.
Ragnar Kjartansson Barbican Art Gallery, 14th July to 4th September
At last this compelling Icelandic contemporary performance artist has been given his first full-career retrospective in the UK. He represented Iceland at the Venice Biennale in 2009 and 2013, and his wonderful multi-screen video performance piece, The Visitors, won the £30,000 Derek Williams purchase prize in 2015. A classical musician, vocalist, artist, painter, sculptor as well as video artist, Kjartansson’s works play deftly with romantic melancholy without losing epic grandeur. Emma Crichton-Miller
The title of this exhibition, part of this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival, comes from a work Scottish artist Douglas Gordon created for Inverleith House in 2005. It reprised Gordon’s 1994 text piece “I believe in miracles”—but also gestured to the miracle that is Inverleith House: a bold contemporary art institution set in one of the world’s great botanical gardens. When Paul Nesbitt became Exhibitions Director in 1986, his brief was to curate shows of botanical art. Gradually, however, he began to include leading international and upcoming British artists, who were inspired by this 18th-century building and its setting. Andy Goldsworthy, Tina Modotti, Ed Ruscha, Richard Tuttle, Isa Genzken, Philip Guston, Richard Hamilton, Cy Twombly, Agnes Martin, Karla Black and Juergen Teller make up a formidable roll-call. This summer’s exhibition includes work by 30 artists—alongside displays of botanical drawings by John Hope (1725-86) and Hugh Cleghorn (1820-95).
William Eggleston Portraits National Portrait Gallery, 21st July to 23rd October
Inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, those masters of black-and-white documentary photography, in the 1960s the American William Eggleston began to explore the dye transfer colour printing process. A ground-breaking 1976 exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, introduced his careful, eccentric, mysteriously beautiful saturated colour photographs of ordinary people from the American South. This is the largest exhibition to date of portraits from his whole career.
Ragnar Kjartansson Barbican Art Gallery, 14th July to 4th September
At last this compelling Icelandic contemporary performance artist has been given his first full-career retrospective in the UK. He represented Iceland at the Venice Biennale in 2009 and 2013, and his wonderful multi-screen video performance piece, The Visitors, won the £30,000 Derek Williams purchase prize in 2015. A classical musician, vocalist, artist, painter, sculptor as well as video artist, Kjartansson’s works play deftly with romantic melancholy without losing epic grandeur. Emma Crichton-Miller
