Along the back alleys, down by the underpass, hidden in ginnels, or the places where many wouldn’t dare venture after dusk, that’s where you’ll find George Shaw walking in the shadows. His work is focused on the Tile Hill estate in Coventry and chronicles a sublime aspect of quiet, understated working class life. Nominated for the Turner Prize in 2011, Shaw was artist in residence at The National Gallery and appears in public collections of major institutions around the world. He is one of the most respected painters of his generation, who has also created cover art for The Fall, Earl Brutus and Gwendoline Riley.
Small Returns is his new exhibition in Sheffield that begins in the years he studied art in the city from 1986 to 1989. Featuring watercolours, drawings, video, collage and photographs, and an extraordinary essay, ‘Art Ambition And Awful Pies’, which he has handwritten on the gallery wall, the display is a compelling Künstlerroman, showing the wellspring of his creative life, from the 1980s to the present day.
Most well-known for his landscape paintings, exquisitely rendered on MDF hardboard in Humbrol enamel paint, Shaw offers a glimpse of England’s hidden reverse from behind faded window nets. His scenes often suggest an aftermath, or the moments before a dramatic event. The centrepiece of Small Returns, a long-closed youth club with ribald graffiti, has echoes of Holbein’s ‘The Ambassadors’ in its composition; shrouded faces from a darker realm are discretely layered into anti-vandalism paint. There is a muted grief in his recent work too, an image of the recently cleared family home emptied of furniture has poignant outlines of a holy water font that once hung on its wall.
Roads to nowhere, silhouettes of bare trees, forked metal fences, snagged tarpaulin. Moss, pebbledash, unrequited lust. Spent fires in the coppice. Flytipped lanes. Torn England flags. Endless grey skies. Rainfall. Boredom. Broken dreams. This is Shaw’s domain; a forgotten post-war council estate fading out on the edge of the city. It would be wrong to suggest his work is altogether serious, though. The puerile often runs alongside the elegiac. Swear words, ejaculations and private parts are sprayed on gable ends and garage doors, adding a touch of the absurd to the otherwise sober exteriors.
Over the course of an afternoon, Shaw gave a tour of Sheffield’s finest hostelries, rifling through a bag of vinyl brought from his home near Eastwood (where he now resides). Telling stories connected to works exhibited in Small Returns, he reveals how these 13 records helped inform the neurotic boy outsider who one day became the master of ‘finding poetry in the mundane.’
George Shaw’s Small Returns is now open at Persistence Works Gallery (Yorkshire Artspace) in Sheffield until 25 April 2026.
To begin reading his Baker’s Dozen, click ‘First Selection’ below
