Exhibition that defies the dog days of summer

THE dog days of August are so unbearably quiet for some of London's commercial art galleries that they call it quits and close the doors until friends and clients empty the sand from their shoes and step back into the normal thrum of life.

Brother and sister team Simon Hester and Leah Hester-Brown see summer as an opportunity to move away from one-name shows or themes and simply bring together, in an exhibition, the varied work of artists associated with their Leeds gallery.

The pace of business may be slower, but enough loyal clients still come through the door to make the show worthwhile.

This relaxed space, off Meanwood Road, five minutes' drive from the city centre, offers an escape and a thirst-quenching experience for the parched art lover.

This year's selection sees Henry Moore's arresting and disturbingly skeletal 1973 lithograph, People, rubbing shoulders with the minimalist oil on canvas abstracts of Jim Orme, the former head of fine art at York College.

He layers textured terrain by tooling the surface of his paint to create an ancient quality, lending a depth and gnarled character to what, at a distance, looks like a straightforward exercise in draughtsmanship and exploration of space.

Mark Halsey's photographic images of human bodies merged with oil on canvas, the forms viewed through overlaid printmaking effects like stencilling, are slick and representative of a trend among some younger artists which may or may not achieve longevity but, then again, is only at a slight remove from Andy Warhol.

As ever, offerings from Glasgow's Norrie Harman find dark beauty where the rest of us see only dreariness, in recesses of urban landscapes like a disused garage forecourt.

Few others would set up their easel to capture Retail Park or Leeds Pool but he manages to fight shy of undermining the architectural integrity of his subject by overly romanticising it; his portraits make no attempt to beautify the subject either, as Andreas The Nervous Berliner would testify.

Harman's gift – one he shares with master draughtsman Joash Woodrow, represented here by a fine series of drawings of Leeds from the 1970s and '80s, is the knack of wearing genius lightly, making it appear that his work is a matter of moments, the result of a few lightning strokes with a magic wand.

The truth in Harman's case is the opposite – there is wizardly alchemy going on all right, but his pieces are worked and reworked painstakingly until layers of "history" are created.

The joy of calling a show Summer Exhibition is that it can be anything, and the observer knows to expect the unexpected.

The slightly unlikely juxtaposition of the beautifully etched black and white prints of Swiss artist Hans Erni beside Harman gives a welcome jolt to the senses.

The five perfectly proportioned pieces from Erni's series of 14, based on Ovid's Metamorphoses, have all the confidence, purity and clarity of the best Picassos, with the sensually yearning Pyramus and Thisbe particularly drawing the

eye and the heart to the tragic divide between the lovers.

Leeds-born and Jakob Kramer and Chelsea-trained Christopher P Wood has very close associations with this gallery – although he was also honoured with an invitation to exhibit in the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition this year, and his work may be seen in public and commercial galleries around the country and at Agnew's, in London.

His work in this show includes vivid flights of imagination bringing together crimson landscape, perfect little birds, puffs of clouds, flowers and star-studded skies. The effect on the eye, and the brain, is one of stepping through a mirror into some of your own more enjoyable dreams.

The small motifs are what you want them to be – signposts, whimsical symbols pointing to feelings about past or future experience, a collection of floating images brought in from the fringes of the mind's eye and mixed up together in a heavenly (or infernal?) jigsaw.

Whatever – it's difficult to drag your gaze away, or stop your foot from trying to step into that world.

"I wasn't aware that Simon was showing these three," says Wood. "I bring things in for framing, and sometimes, before I get back to collect them, he has put them on the wall. He's such an old friend that I don't mind.

"I went to a show of Indian decorative art, called Gardens and Cosmos, at the British Museum a couple of years ago, and the works were extraordinary paintings from Jaipur made around the 1880s.

"It took me a long time to assimilate them, and I later decided to explore decorative art but in a serious way, looking at the underlying poignancy.

"Decorative art is meant to be a celebration of the superficial and in Western culture it is not taken seriously or applauded. I wanted to give a certain thoughtfulness to the decorative."

His take on the form is to embroider among the joyful colours and motifs, the "what ifs" of emptying the mind and apparently letting randomness take over. The deliberateness of embellishment is playfully undermined by creatures and visual toys that both amuse and provoke.

From a period before these stunning oils on canvas, is Lost Road – one of Wood's celebrated Red Riding Hood series – in which our heroine is descending a path through a misty, potentially threatening and unknown forest. However, she is cocooned in a protective light of assurance and confidence, sure of foot and unselfconsciously knowing.

As with all of Wood's work, there is parallel exploration of the physical and the world of the imagination.

At an emotional level, he concedes that his treatment of the subject matter here could well be a reflection of his feelings about his own teenage daughters at the time.

"As a father of girls around that age, you do worry about their vulnerability and how life will work out for them. Perhaps the paintings are prescient, but in a positive way. She knows where she is going."

Artco, 1 Meanwood Close, Leeds LS7 2JF Tel 0113 262 0056. The Summer Exhibition runs until August 28, open Mon-Fri 9am-5pm, Sat 10am-3pm.