Gallery VI

Installation view of Gallery VI Photo: John Bodkin/DawkinsColour Arranged by Stephen Chambers and Stephen Farthing, this room is dominated by Anselm Kiefer’s monumental painting Einschüsse. Here, a massive mountain range has been punctured by pinkish orange holes, from which pigment seeps and oozes down towards burned-out fields, their charred crops resembling the battered victims of advancing armies. Kiefer has long been haunted by war, whereas Callum Innes asserts a far more minimal, abstract vision. His stark and simple painting – one half yellow, the other half white – has a surprisingly ‘raw’ impact, especially in contrast with the heavily encrusted, cracked surface of Kiefer’s exhibit.

Across the room, Olwyn Bowey’s dense paintings of plants in her conservatory enjoy an unpredictable dialoguewith Rosa Loy’s The Planet Shop, a large painting of young women unaccountably arranging images of the globe in a shop window. The mood of strangeness intensifies in an enigmatic painting by Antoni Tàpies, and in Michael Landy’s enormous
Paul Huxley RA. 'Proteus VI' Photo: John Bodkin/DawkinsColourcharcoal drawing called H2NY Machine Created to Destroy the Tingueley Museum 2. Filled with skulls, pieces of machinery, spanners, saws, the European Cup and even Mickey Mouse, it testifies to Landy’s obsessions.

But calm returns when we look up at Leonard McComb’s colossal images of saints, which he executed for Westminster Cathedral. These are far removed from the pared-down, dynamic abstraction found in Paul Huxley’s row of paintings (left). Huxley’s impressive work is hung directly below Vanessa Jackson’s large abstraction. ‘These two artists are old friends,’ says Chambers with a smile, ‘so I thought that I’d put them in bed together.’