2011 was a year of beauty and horror in the arts, as TAMZIN LEWIS recalls

THE year began as it meant to go on. Dismal wastelands, scarred landscapes and scrappy woods adorned Baltic’s whitewashed walls like glossy yet strangely grubby jewels. Painted by George Shaw in shiny Humbrol paints, which he calls humble, because pots were stored in his dad’s shed and art shops were a bit scary when he was growing up, these were everyman pictures we could all recognise.

In Shaw’s show The Sly and Unseen Day (a quote from Tess of the D’Urbervilles) were abandoned pubs, dilapidated public libraries and a wall daubed with red; atmospheric paintings with a welcome political edge. As austerity became an over-used byword for 2011, Shaw captured Britain at its bleakest, and as his painting The End of Time suggests, virtually apocalyptic.

Which doesn’t mean to say Shaw’s work is depressing and his titles are intended at least to bring a wry smile to your lips. Take for example The Assumption, showing the bleak locked gates of Shaw’s old Catholic primary school. A place from which the Virgin Mary could ascend to heaven? There’ s quite a bit of humour in the depopulated eeriness of the rundown Coventry housing estate Shaw paints.

And this is a reflection of the man himself. Shaw is a cheeky chappy to interview, explaining that he would have loved to be a singer, but he can’t sing, so art was his fallback. His work is especially influenced by his teenage love for The Jam and The Specials and his paintings are the colourful equivalent of riots on the dance floor.

Shaw also said that he creates his work for everyone to appreciate and understand, not just for a very select few in the art world. Which is probably why he didn’t win the big money, when Baltic rounded off the year with another, much smaller, show of his work as part of the Turner Prize exhibition. He lost out on the £25,000, but I like to think of the George Shaw Appreciation Society raising a glass to his brilliance, perhaps while listening to PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake.

If Shaw deals with understated catastrophe, 19th Century painter John Martin did the end of the world Lady Gaga-style. His was the 19th Century art of sensationalism where both subject and scale were epic. Heaven and Hell was a mind-blowing retrospective of the visionary Northumbrian’s work at the Laing Art Gallery, which deservedly moved on to find favour at Tate Britain. And while Martin’s theatrical staging of God’s flames of wrath from Exodus and Revelation were truly awesome, other works including The Last Judgement demonstrated the melancholy he could also master.

There’s no doubt that Martin intended to solicit an emotional reaction from his audiences, but someone who didn’t even need to try on this score was Holocaust photographer Henryk Ross. As an official photographer at Lodz, the last Jewish ghetto in Poland, Ross was in a position to take pictures of domestic scenes in addition to deportations and hangings. His work has brought fresh insight into life in Lodz in the time before it was liquidated in the summer of 1944. Two years earlier, all children, sick and elderly were deported to death camps as they had no ‘labour value’. Lodz Ghetto Album, an exhibition of his pictures at Side Gallery, was absolutely heart-breaking and testament to the incredible scope of the under-threat gallery.

Similarly ambitious is the Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art (NCGA) which this year staged a fascinating two-part exhibition The Wonders of the Invisible World and The Wonders of the Visible World. In these exhibitions, the NGCA made a connection between two things. The ongoing vogue in the art world for the occult and the idea that the machinations of those in power are, as Alice in Wonderland comments ‘stranger and stranger’. So at the NGCA ideas of shadowy ghouls (or people with sheets on their heads) crossed paths with the even more intangible ideas of how our economy is propped up by the invisible hand of the market. Among artists using photography and film to capture spirits, self-combustion and transubstantiation is Samantha Clark, whose Levitation references the Book of Revelations. She may be using video animation, but Clark shares the same preoccupation with the apocalypse as the Victorian John Martin.

Now I’m back on to religion, also worthy of mention in this rather gloomy round-up was the impressive Norman Adams’s exhibition The Way of the Cross, held at the University Gallery, Northumbria University. Let’s just pray that cuts in 2012 don’t crucify our burgeoning arts scene.

The Wonders of the Visible World is at the NGCA, Sunderland until February 4, 2012, www.ngca.co.uk

The Turner Prize is at Baltic until January 8, 2012.