Pick of the week

In advance of its bid to be the 2025 UK City of Culture, Southampton has refurbished its City Art Gallery, which has re-opened with a powerful show of paintings by Julian Perry on the theme of coastal erosion as a symptom of climate change. There are 30 new works centred on a polyptych ‘secular altarpiece to the Assumption of CO2’ (above right) inspired by Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. Around it are 14 3-D cube works, transparent perspex boxes each containing a double-sided painting and a mirror, so that one can see before and after at the same time (above left). There are also three large canvases of uprooted trees first shown at the Venice Biennale.

I should declare an interest here, too, as I own a small painting by Mr Perry of the sea gently washing onto the beach near where he works at Dunwich, Suffolk’s long-eroded port. At first it seems an empty scene, but, as one looks, the more evident it becomes that the waves are thick with earth clawed from the shore. The exhibition, ‘There Rolls the Deep’ (until June 4), should be Mr Perry’s long-overdue reputational breakthrough.