Shock! Horror! It is not every day that the Sun runs a front-cover story on an art exhibition, but it would be foolish to think that there is something very extraordinary about Karl Grimes's latest show. Bodies preserved in formaldehyde - which are the subject of Grimes's photographs - have, after all, been central to some of the most heavily promoted art of the decade.
Grimes, the story goes, came upon a collection of foetuses preserved in formaldehyde while working in a hospital in suitably distant Milan. The 19th-century jars were once used in medical education, offering young doctors illustrations of some notable con genital abnormalities.
These jars, in other words, had an important role in defining the limits of humanity, in determining whether some- thing was someone. As such, they make a potentially useful resource for any artist trying to work around these issues. Grimes is one such; but, as this show suggests, there is some distance between a potentially useful resource and an effective motif.
A certain Damien Hirst-ish savour to Grimes's project is unignorable, even if the English artist produces by far the more resonant images. By presenting human foetuses rather than sharks or sheep, Grimes suggests that he is trying to work without the "mesh of distance".
The problem, of course, is that the artist's presentation, with its funereal frames and its supersaturated colours, brings along its own mesh of distance, while missing out on the subtler pay-offs available when working through metaphors. Sometimes, it seems, the best way to talk about people is to talk about sheep.
Until April 28th.