Hotly-tipped storyteller George Shaw brings The Sly and Unseen Day to BALTIC Gateshead

Exhibition: George Shaw – The Sly and Unseen Day, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Arts, Gateshead, until May 15 2011

George Shaw is rapidly building a reputation through mundanity. Best known for his spooky paintings taken from photographs around his bleak childhood home on the Tile Hill Estate in Coventry, he deals in grey skies, rain-sodden pavements, slabs of concrete, rusting garages and withered trees engulfed in gloom.

These canvasses are alive with inexplicit narratives and tension, from the peculiarity of Englishness to nostalgia for a lost childhood and the beauty in the ordinary.

The Age of Bullshit pictures a demolished pub, The Assumption makes the gates of a local school resemble a scene from a sinister fairytale and a series on the estate, Ash Wednesday, depicts it hour-by-hour during the course of a single day.

The artist’s largest solo show to date is accompanied by a new piece of fiction by Peter Hobbs, but Shaw’s masterful powers of suggestion are certain to leave viewers forming their own stories for each piece.

• Open 10am-6pm (10.30am-6pm Tuesday). Admission free.