Colourful characters

Figure Walking, Figure Running, Figure With Arm Extension: the titles of Nicola Tyson's paintings suggest a certain clinical detachment in their execution.

With their depiction of bone-like limbs, truncated body parts, meat-like contours of flesh and bodily distortions, they are presented like dissected specimens in a colour-field painting.

These are certainly strange paintings, but rather than being disturbing they seem, both in the clean, graphic quality of the work and in the way they, to an extent, parody other artists, more like caricatures.

Figure With Arm Extension, for instance, shows a figure with a bloody stump for an arm, unnaturally tapering legs and blank potato head. You think of Francis Bacon's deformed, stunted and agonised figures but without the accompanying howling angst, or Bacon's dynamic, darkly expressive painterliness.

Tyson's paintings are more concerned with colour and form and elegant contours, less with meaning, and are both grotesque and slightly comic.

Bedridden is even stranger: a huge bird-like figure, with bone legs and butterfly wings attached to its rump, stands on a landscape of fleshy, Philip Guston pinks and reds.

Upstairs, a series of colour portrait prints show garish, mask-like faces in violently contrasting colours, the flat surfaces of swirling colour perhaps parodying the muddy, impastoed expressionism of painters such as Frank Auerbach.

Until Feb 19, Sadie Coles HQ, 35 Heddon Street W1, Tue to Sat 10am to 6pm, free. Tel: 020 7434 2227. Tube: Oxford Circus