Principal lecturer in paintings and print making at Brighton University, Tony Wilson is known for the visual language he uses in his images.

Initially, they appear as a collage of unrelated elements, though it soon becomes clear that no motif is superfluous.

As Mel Gooding writes in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition: "In Wilson's work, the pictorial surface becomes a theatre of memory, a field of engagement with psychic and emotional reality. And on that surface, he assembles without regard for any other logic than that of association and emotive effect disparate objects, remembered and imaginary, banal or mysterious."

Wilson established this intensely personal style in the Seventies and has continued ever since.

This large exhibition traces his changing subject matter, from the early works influenced by the music of American saxophonist Charlie Parker, to growing up in the industrial Midlands, the memorable visits to his father's workshop and the brutal hardness of machinery, manufactured objects and tools.

A series of works from the late Nineties, Iron Ladder to Remembered Figures, uses - in his own words - "the notion of a ladder as a metaphor to visit people and times both past and present, iron being an element of great strength which is reduced to dust by the passage of time."

In other works, he references violence in the world and its devastation, a subject that disturbs him not least because he was born in 1944.

The pinnacle of this show is his piece relating to two figures who died in the First World War, both unknown to Wilson.

One is his grandfather, the other the father of a French farmer whose house Wilson has owned since the early Nineties.

The house has profoundly influenced his paintings during the past decade.

In it, he found a letter written by its combatant inhabitant during the Great War.

Requiem is intended a pictorial memorial to these two soldiers.

His grandfather fought in France and Flanders before dying in England in 1916, the same year as the Frenchman who wrote the letter.

Wilson has carried what he knows of these lives and war with him, explored it and allowed its permanent shadows to take residence on canvas.