The Law Society Art Group is one of the society’s oldest clubs, and this year members are exhibiting in its 62nd annual show. 2022’s show has two settings – online for the complete show, and the Rolls Building on Fetter Lane, home of London’s business and property courts, for a select sample of work. (There is open public access to the Rolls Building exhibition, which is free.)

Even when art is a side hustle, subject matters reflect the society and events of their time, and there are titles which reference Ukraine, Uganda, Malacca, and the Old Bailey. Kay Kante’s oil ‘Brick Lane’ includes an electric scooter. Clive Sayer depicts a ‘Kitchen Confab’, which is about the scale of social interaction many readers managed through pandemic restrictions. There is a similar intimacy in Jennifer Tovey’s excellent ‘The Craft Room’, a pastel drawing of a couple engaged in watercolour sketching. Erroll Neill’s ‘House of Misery’ appears as an allegory involving a woman and monkey, played out in front of a breezeblock wall that’s strewn with graffiti (viewed online, I assume it’s a bog painting – it would certainly work best at scale).

Of the ‘3D’ works, Jane Hinde’s sculpture bust ‘Homage of Yves Klein’ stands out, with the sensitive structing of the subject colliding with the work’s bright blue colour with something of a jolt.

Of the landscapes, it’s worth highlighting Louise Sweet’s ‘North’ – a spare landscape of perfectly controlled yet relaxed lines, and excellent use of colour. Sarah McDougal Duncan’s ‘Garden Wall’ shares some of the same qualities, as does a colourful seascape by Duaa Izzidien (‘Safe Haven’). John Joseph’s more traditional oil, ‘Old and New’, in which a canal lock and cottage are backed by tall new buildings under construction – rather than offering contrast, they seem to have an easy coexistence.

The art group’s chair, Pey Kan Su, has a way of freely warping perspectives while keeping his work representational, done most effectively this year in ‘Holiday at Grandma’.

There is a lot that can be read into Ruth Munby’s ‘The Dolls House’. It’s a beautiful painting, with close attention to texture. But with some dolls seemingly animated and others not, all overseen by two children, it seems to speak of lives being played out through forces beyond the control of these diminutive actors – the meaning worn fairly lightly.

The exhibition is online now, and the Rolls Building exhibit runs from 20 June 2022 until 20 December 2022. It is curated and hosted by the Rolls Building Art & Education Trust. The Chancellor of the High Court, Sir Julian Flaux, will select 3 works from the physical exhibition for the award of Radcliffe Chambers Prize.