BELIEVE it or not, it is now over 20 years since a delightfully informal and slightly anarchic art galley cum café opened on the top floor of an old Victorian building in Newington, in the centre of Liverpool.
It started life as the Acorn Gallery, and although it has been reborn as EggSpace since then, it is still the same island of bohemia it always was: venerability does not mean that the Egg has joined the establishment.
Exhibitions are organised now by the artists’ group Headspace@EggSpace, and the latest group showing entitled Visions is as provoking as ever.
Tommy McHugh’s transition from Wirral hard man to successful artist has been one of the most extraordinary stories to come out of the city in recent years.
After a stroke six years ago, he has become fired up with creativity, earning him international interest both as an artist and as a subject for academic study for neurologists trying to puzzle out exactly what has happened in his mind.
Here are no less than 11 of his latest works, with titles that reflect his almost compulsive wish to get to the bottom of what has happened: titles like Explosion of Thought, Begins, the Maze of the Mind and Who am I?
Taken together, they are a fascinating if somewhat oblique view of a journey that probably none of us will ever take.
George Cottier is making a name for himself as an off-the-wall performer on the north-west comedy circuit, but his two canvases at the Egg are altogether darker stuff.
Self-Portrait is actually a pair of paintings in which Cottier presents himself as the classic tortured soul, but it’s Dale Stre Here is a nightmarish landscape of violent death and destruction, somewhere between Goya and Mad Max.
A second look and the skyline of the buildings is all too familiar: maybe the title gives it away to Liverpool viewers, and the contrast of the homely and the horrific is a familiar device, but it’s carried off with real flair and a gruesome conviction.
Bargains of the show are James Holz’s whimsical little acrylics at little more than pocket money prices.
Any one of them will make you smile, and while there’s a lot to be said in making original art available inexpensively, I wonder whether Holz is underselling himself as the price tickets on the paintings would barely cover the cost of the raw materials.
Les Sumner’s brilliantly-coloured series of oils reinterprets a lot of space photography going back to the Apollo days, while Carl Rothwell evokes the world of 19th-century Charles Dickens in Dawkins and Associates.
The exhibition runs to July 9.
