Alfred Hickling 

Intimacy

Lowry
  
  


"They fuck you up, your mum and dad," wrote Philip Larkin. And if you grow up to become an artist, you can return the compliment. Lea Andrews photographs his parents looking grim, embarrassed, either side of a small childhood snap of their offspring, then shows his adult self standing stark naked between them. The first has echoes of Van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding. The second is just a Freudian nightmare.

Selected from Charles Saatchi's gift to the Arts Council collection, this show illustrates the claustrophobia of close relationships. It's full of images in which all concerned look as if they ought to seek counselling. Gerard Hemsworth's grandiose Table Manners features the inhabitants of a Hockney double portrait after a bad row. He slumps, face down, on the table; she braces herself against a chair and stares into the middle distance. She has forgotten to put on any clothes.

The reigning master of parental close observation is this year's Turner prize unlucky loser, Richard Billingham, who is well represented here. There's a classic snap of Billingham's father Ray in a habitual drunken stupor. Making the most of this artist's trademark processed-down-the-chemist technology, part of the image is blacked out. Ray, too, has blacked out, his radiant nose just millimetres from impact with the filthy carpet.

This is the kind of show in which even the better-adjusted families are made to seem dysfunctional. There's nothing extraordinary about Michael and Margaret in Joanna Kirk's dual portraits. The pictures tell you that he plays golf and drives a Volvo, and that she is active in the women's circle and likes Jimmy Young - except that they don't. Kirk's method is to withhold as much information as possible. By stranding her sitters in a non-context of white, empty space, she takes the format of the Georgian swagger portrait, then drains it of its swagger. An apparently affluent couple are left pictorially impoverished.

Still, it would probably be better to be framed in one of Kirk's portrait-voids than represented by an entry in one of Victoria Hall's waspishly dismissive family trees. Hall substitutes names and birth dates for a single-line character summation: "Always wanted a fur coat", "Attacked by an Alsatian at seven", "Pity she's so fat". Who needs enemies when you have close relations?

· Until April 22. Details: 0161-876 2020.

 

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