Round the galleries

The autumn brings a fine crop of new exhibitions, some of them even full of ‘mellow fruitfulness’. I have been watching the development of Julian Perry’s work over the past ten years with considerable pleasure, but his new show is his best yet. Perry has an eye for the details of suburban living and recreation, for south coast holiday homes, caravan parks and tower blocks. His last show, at Guildhall in 2004, focused on the arboreal delights of Epping Forest. In his new one, A Common Treasury: The Sheds Lost to the Olympiad (Austin/Desmond, Pied Bull Yard, 68/69 Great Russell Street, WC1, until 16 November), Perry turns his attention to the ad hoc building fashions on allotments, the scavenging and making do, the recycling of materials like old planks, doors and corrugated iron. These sheds, on the Manor Garden Allotments in east London, are part of that area to go under the bulldozer in preparation for the 2012 Olympics, and Perry pays tribute to their perky individualism in the last days before demolition.

Skilled in the layered and luminous techniques of the Old Masters, Perry paints the sheds on single panels or paired with vegetables on a diptych, as if floating against a featureless ground. The neutrality of these plain or stippled backgrounds is checked by the evident affection of his detailing of flaking paint, rotting wood and peeling asphalt. Never has Perry’s subject married so well with his meticulous methods of painting, and never have his methods been put to better use. These pictures are superbly painted. The small panels are perhaps the most immediately attractive, but the large ‘No Door Shed’ on a white ground, for instance, is exquisitely rendered and conceived. These paintings are not only a memorable tribute to a dying urban sub-culture but also stunning formal explorations of what paint can do in a thoroughly contemporary way.