A solid artistic movement founded on the factory floor

The venue for this show of paintings, which document heavy industry in the north of England, takes its name from the Merz Barn, in Ambleside, Cumbria. It was the creation the refugee German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), who created a series of Merzbauten: huts or cabins, with modernist interiors, fashioned from found objects and materials.

The gallery is the brainchild of David Rushton, an artist, cultural entrepreneur, theorist and filmmaker. Merz is a tribute, not only to Schwitters and his modernist legacy, but also to the idea that culture and community are deeply intertwined.

Rushton’s idealism is both remarkable and inspirational. Here he shows the work of his late friend and colleague, David Bainbridge, who died in 2013. They were two of the prime movers behind the conceptual art movement that flourished in the 1970s. Bainbridge’s paintings are far more traditional and representational, and most were made between 1990 and 2000 but recall events, people and places from 30 years earlier.

They show part of Bainbridge’s early life — he worked for a time as a miners’ bus driver — and are an archive of memories from a way of work. A central image is an homage to the English artist Eric Ravillious (1903-42) who worked as a war artist and depicted men and machines with in a bold, but subtle, illustrative style. One of his works Ship’s Screw on a Railway Truck, shows a huge, brass propeller being transported across a wintery landscape against a backdrop of industrial buildings.

Bainbridge adopts the setting but in place of the propeller depicts a series of long vertical steel tubes that were filled with coal, and heated in an anaerobic atmosphere, to make coke. Bainbridge remembers the structure as consisting of three rows of four tubes, but subsequent research revealed that the configuration was two rows of six.

It is an interesting comment on the function of memory and can be applied to the other images, which lie somewhere between document and interpretation. What cannot be in doubt is their authenticity of feeling, as well as their solid draughtsmanship.

Elsewhere, the traditional idea of industrial ugliness is transformed into a strange beauty, where steel gantries reflect the pink glow of sunset or a group of men, gathered in an all-night canteen, recall the urban poeticism of the US painter Edward Hopper.

The Merz is an ideal setting for this work. An abandoned brick-built lemonade factory, now transformed, in a small town in the Nith valley offers an elegiac hope that the future is still to be constructed.

Until April 30