PRIVATE VIEW

Small is Beautiful Flowers East, London E8

This is the Flowers East Gallery's 16th annual exhibition under the "Small is Beautiful" banner. It's always one of the most inventive of the London art world's Christmas shows, with an extraordinary range of artists responding to a given theme. This year the theme of music has produced one of the most diverse and distinguished lists of contributors yet. Inevitably, there are a lot of artists that one associates with Flowers anyway, but there's also a good range of invitees from further afield, especially from the world of abstract art: Roger Ackling; John McLean (above); Sandra Blow; Felim Egan; Ian McKeever; Sean Scully - the list begins to read like a catalogue of the best of British abstraction. Some of them are artists whose work one associates with music anyway - James Hugonin, for instance, whose subtle-toned grids of coloured squares always seem like a visual form of a specific musical expression, almost a notation; but there are others for whom the theme has demanded a radical departure. It's a great mixture, by no means all of it up to the high standard of those that I've mentioned. But that's the fun of it.

Flowers East Gallery, 199-205 Richmond Rd, London E8 (0181-985 3333) to 24 Jan 1998

Richard Ingleby