'A Gap in the Clouds' (Heong Gallery, Cambridge until Feb 8 2026)

Paul Nash, Spring Landscape, 1914, Jerwood Collection

The Heong, Downing College's pocket-sized art venue, is one of Cambridge's unfeted gems, putting on thoughtful, left-field exhibitions of largely contemporary art. In the last year they've given us, amongst others, Gillian Ayres, volcanoes and now A Gap in the Clouds, billed as an exploration of 'landscape as a way to navigate the relationship between our mental lives and the world around us' but really a show as amorphous, shifting and indefinable as the title suggests. The gallery space has large windows which look out onto elegant college grounds. Previous shows have effectively brought the outside in by including sculpture but here the restrained, constrained nature provides an anchor for the art to pull against.  Andreas Eriksson's spindly bronze, Content is a Glimpse, is like a warped hourglass, standing in dialogue with the Barbara Hepworth beyond the glass, creates silhouette at once more fragile and more solid than the monumental bronze. 

To describe a show that includes Edvard Munch's Melancholy and Ai Weiwei's Wheatfield with Crows as eclectic seems an understatement. Munch's brooding figure is subsumed into a pathetic fallacy of exaggerated perspective and wintery sky, confronted in the bottom left by an animalistic shoreline. Ai Weiwei's inspiration is art, not nature, one of a series of lego recreations which plasticise and politicise over-familiar paintings, in this case with the inclusion of drones. (Added resonance for anyone who saw Anselm Kiefer's reinterpretation of the same painting at the RA this summer). There is precious little overt connection between any of the works here, and in many ways that is the point.

Rachel Howard, You Can Save Me, 2015, Jerwood Collection

Just as you can look up at the sky and see animals, cities or nothing at all, so, the curators assert, artists can take nature, real and imagined, and run with it in all manner of different directions. Two Paul Nash's and David Jones (an artist well represented at that other great Cambridge institution, Kettle's Yard) bring conventionality; Frank Walter's tiny enclosure of bar-like  trees and Yto Barrada's lush turquoises also exploit landscape traditions. Kim Bohie's Towards makes you as languid as the black dog sprawled in the foreground, lazing on a Sunday suburban afternoon. These three have been loaned by the Roberts Collection, Nash and Jones come from Jerwood, but the curators have cast a wide net here and the effort pays off.

Many other works explore landscape through abstraction: Koo Jeong A's minimal monochrome blobs could be mushrooms or microscopic amoebae; Rachel Howard's delicate spidery greys suggest woodgrain, water, mist; Peter Lanyon's Sharp Grass is all gesture. You can start to wonder if the connections are too loose, but this in itself generates a mindfulness of its own. The curation is clean yet quirky: sizes, sight-levels and a consistently uneven rhythm keep you looking. There is a beautiful juxtaposition between Wheatfield, which dominates the end wall of the gallery, and the echoing colours of Latifa Echakhch's gleaming abstraction like falling leaves. The whole exhibition hangs by an intangible thread, teetering on the brink of nothingness. Can you see the gap in the clouds? It is worth going to find out.