The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain: Pallant House Gallery review: Turning the humble cup and saucer into cutting-edge art

This excellent exhibition is a fascinating walk through the often surprisingly radical history of British still life, from an 18th-century image of a joint of beef through the surrealism of Paul Nash, to David Hockney’s iconic Pop Art painting of a Typhoo teabag

‘Bright Interests’ by Edward Wadsworth makes a great poster image for the exhibition – but lacks the sinister edge Magritte or Max Ernst would have brought to the subject (Edward Alexander Wadsworth)

There was a time, not so long ago, when an exhibition of 20th-century British still life would have seemed – how can I put this politely? – not the most exciting prospect. On the continent, artists such as Picasso used the genre of still life, with its focus on everyday objects (flowers, pots and pans), as the starting point for some of the most radical paintings of the 20th century. Yet even British artists have tended to deride British Modern Art as timid and provincial, politely lagging behind the European and American avant gardes.

Chichester’s Pallant House Gallery, however, has been at the hub of a major reassessment of British Modernism over the past two decades, with exhibitions that have revived the reputations of near forgotten figures such as John Minton and Glyn Philpot, while turning the perceived and much-scorned gentility and quirkiness of this kind of art into very bankable virtues. Judging on past form, future exhibitions in this substantial survey will include many surprising works, while making intriguing connections between past and present.

Its current exhibition, The Shape of Things, sets out its stall by contrasting historical classics with cutting-edge contemporary works. And if you think paintings of domestic clutter can hardly be cutting edge, you’re immediately proved wrong by Gordon Cheung’s glitched collages in which digitally sourced images appear to slide off the paper. British-Israel artist Ori Gerscht plays on the idea of still life as a meditation on the fleeting nature of reality, as conceived by the 17th-century Dutch painters who established the genre with their studies of fading flowers and rotting fruit. His digitally enabled images of the kind of vases painted by the much loved 20th century Italian artist Giorgio Morandi being shot to pieces with an air rifle, bring a very 21st-century twist to that time-honoured notion.