Taking up a trend

More affordable than the established academics at the Royal Academy's Summer Show, and with a younger, sexier profile, Premiums gives tentative art buyers the opportunity to spot rising talent, snap up artwork and engage in some trend-spotting among the current crop of students at the RA's post-graduate schools.

The work, however, appears to be as happily disparate as it comes.

There's Jenny Dunseath's impressive architectural construction made from plywood, Ruth Todhunter's neon painted road signs on MDF planks and Edward Kay's strange little paintings which appear to be pastiches of the kind of sentimental English Victorian painting that you can currently see so much of at the V&A.

Though subject matter and execution are broad, one does begin to detect a general mood of strangeness and absurdity.

With their bright, brash colours, Sara Gilbert's gloss paintings on stand-up MDF panels make the obligatory grown-up druggy references to much of children's TV of the 1970s.

In one, a spaced out father and son are surrounded by cute cartoon creatures. Dad holds a bottle of pills in his hand, and look, there's a mushroom in the undergrowth.

Sam Porritt's melted wax effigy and makeshift monkey skull on which a crouching figure - like the Rodin figure of despair - attaches itself, are like Voodoo totems.

Meanwhile Richard Moon's two huge canvases - 1940s kid being instructed on the wearing of gasmasks and a boggle-eyed portrait of a young man - manage to exude both melancholy and weirdness at the same time.

Until Mar 21, Royal Academy, Piccadilly W1, daily 10am to 6pm (Fri to 10pm), free. Tel: 020 7300 8000. Tube: Green Park/Piccadilly Circus