A recently decommissioned jail in Reading, where Oscar Wilde was once infamously imprisoned for two years, is home to Artangel’s new exhibition Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison (4 September-20 October). Among the works by 23 artists and writers are a number of specially commissioned pieces, including Marlene Dumas’s paintings of famous faces who have been behind bars (including Wilde); a gold-plated mosquito net by Steve McQueen; and a concrete platform by Jean-Michel Pancin that incorporates the original wooden door of Wilde’s cell. Here, every Sunday, one of a selection of famous performers—including Patti Smith and Ben Whishaw—will read Wilde’s De Profundis in its entirety.
This important, beautifully curated survey of Maria Lassnig (until 18 September) at Tate Liverpool charts the artist’s 70-year career from the early 1940s up to her death in 2014. In a parade of vivid and often excruciatingly unflinching self-portraits and body studies, we see the evolution and expansion of her unmistakable and original voice. It is part of an unmissable double-whammy at the museum, being accompanied by a Francis Bacon show, Invisible Rooms (also until 18 September).
If you really want to know the story of painting and colour in the Middle Ages, you have to look at illuminated manuscripts. The Fitzwilliam Museum’s major exhibition Colour: the Art and Science of Illuminated Manuscripts (until 30 December), which is being staged as part of the Cambridge institution’s 200th anniversary celebrations, reinforces how much science informed Medieval artistic practice.
Three must-see shows in the capital: Ragnar Kjartansson at the Barbican; Painters' Paintings at the National Gallery; Georgia O’Keeffe at Tate Modern
