JOHN KIRBY spent his childhood in Liverpool feeling out of place.

Struggling to come to terms with how his homosexuality fitted into his Catholicism and the expectations of his parents, he often contemplated suicide but says he was “too much of a coward” to carry it out.

He left the city almost as soon as he could, moving first to India as a teenager and later to London to study art, yet it has forever remained in his thoughts and is central to his painting.

The Walker Art Gallery then, where Kirby both learned to appreciate art and saw his first image of a naked body, is a fitting location for a retrospectve of his work.

Executed with a richness reminiscent of the venue’s Victorian collection that so influenced him as a young man, his paintings nevertheless appear trapped in inactivity.

His subjects – a range of different characters deliberately physically resembling real people including himself and his father – seem self-consciously frozen in time.

Many of them stare out of the canvas with impenetrable facial expressions. Are they unhappy or have they simply accepted their bleak situation?