Summer Show 2001 @ Elm Hill Contemporary Art, Norwich

Summer Show 2001 @ Elm Hill Contemporary Art, Norwich

By RICHARD INMAN

Jill Bishop puts her faith behind seven distinguished artists inviting public scrutiny and creative debate. All are welcome to browse, none should feel intimidated by Abstract Art that has been around longer than most of us.

John Loker, like David Hockney, emerged from Yorkshire and is in danger of offering a dynamic language of marks that are more controlled than his predecessor.

In Signals, oil on paper, landscaped shapes are born out of extreme perspective, colour scratched through to make diverse angles, a towering monolith.

Howard Hodgkin is an English Romantic, by comparison.

Elizabeth Humphreys produces curious devices by overlaying precisely-torn paper. Fish-scale patterns within opposing triangles, surfaces brushed with gold are more about edges than internal colour.

Mary Webb's deceptively simple tonal rectangles recall Joseph Albers who taught at the German Bauhaus House.

Mary Mellor's painted reliefs and spot-paintings fuse Constructivism (1900s) with optical art of the 1960s. Alexandra Drysdale's work has a graphic subtlety. Coastguard fuses precise cut-out shapes with graduated colours on silk to make an abstract comic strip sequence.

Zheni Warner's dazzling theatres of high-gloss colour will transfix and absorb you. Layers of intense and delicate tints of colour have the control of Jackson Pollock and deserve a place in the Tate Modern.

Polly Cruise shows a dazzling sculpture made from flowing Perspex forms, copper and gold-abrased bronze.

An exhibition of our time; pop in at least twice – please, Norfolk.

t Open 11am-5pm daily, closed Sundays, until June 30.