‘The George Shaw exhibition is largely comprised of Shaw’s paintings of Tile Hill, the estate he grew up on that has obsessed him ever since he started painting. The drizzly visions of an empty, everyman England transcend their bleak settings, inviting viewers to project on to them their own childhood ennui. A rope dangling from a tree, a lock-up garage left open, a broken goalpost: each one suggests possible youthful adventures – or traumas. “There’s nothing like them in existence, either in writing or in painting. Certainly not as rich or complex in terms of chronicling a particular kind of place – the British council estate”‘ (curator of the exhibition, in a Guardian piece here). The Back That Used to Be the Front was painted in 2008.