George Shaw
South London Gallery
George Orwell once gloomily prophesied that the future of England would be in the “light industrial areas and along the arterial roads . . . everywhere, indeed, on the outskirts of great towns.” This depressing vision of modern suburbia has been given a powerful expression in the paintings of George Shaw, who for the past two decades has taken as his subject the unlovely Tile Hill postwar housing project in the British city of Coventry, where he grew up. Human presence is limited to graffiti, littering, and traces of vandalism; the mood is one of bleak melancholy. Depictions of painfully ordinary