Billy Childish

Punk's not dead, and neither is skiffle in the quaintly timeless art of Billy Childish. A more appropriate moniker might be Billy Perpetual Adolescent for a man who seems stuck in the ­depressions and self-pity of his ­teenage years. A placard on which he's written a kind of manifesto for Childishness paints a picture of a ­genuinely miserable existence, a ­scenario for the devil's sitcom. And yet his music, playing nearby, is likable stuff, and so are the record sleeves telling of a career in punk that began in 1977. These ­engaging ephemera are confined to the upstairs gallery at the ICA, set up as a sort of Billy Childish archive. ­Downstairs are his new paintings, on which this well-earned exhibition by such a veteran cult figure will be judged. Childish is a much better painter than Damien Hirst, but that's like ­saying a live dog catches a stick faster than a dead dog. Perhaps more to the point is that his paintings have something in common with those of his former girlfriend Tracey Emin: both are addicted to the expressionist fjords of Edvard Munch, while being mired in the shorescapes of ­south-east England. Childish seems to me a mirror image of Emin, if she had a sex change and gave up conceptual art. There's the same scratchy insistence on me, me, me that is at once maddening and heroic. Childish is no Munch, but these ­paintings of isolated figures and coastal dreck have the guts to be totally joyless and maudlin, and might well have come out of a 1950s art school. This cussed quality makes for an ­interesting exhibition – and I trust Billy Childish to go on irritating the skin of modern Britain for some time to come. Until 18 April. Details: 020-7930 3647.