Boris Mikhailov: Triptychs

Do photos of ugliness need to be ugly? Boris Mikhailov's large-format images of bomzhi - the new homeless who, along with the new rich, signal post-Soviet Ukraine's teetering equilibrium on the capitalism seesaw - suggest that they do. These triptychs are as much images of suffering as any trio of martyrs hung above an altar. But, unlike their predecessors, they are troublingly unbeautiful. To look at a naked woman, tights at half-mast, is to wonder why she is humiliating herself this way? For Mikhailov? For money? For us? She has nothing in common with, for instance, the well-known image of a bare-breasted Kate Moss, trousers provocatively undone. Except that she does: it's just that her value, and her fee (if there is one), is much, much lower. And conversely, the sexual availability she signals is not a marketing ploy. Unlike Moss and her ilk, most women who take their clothes off for money are doing it because of the money, not for the sake of fashion.

Mikhailov's subject these days is post-Communist chaos, so perhaps it's appropriate that this exhibition is cacophonous. The 13 triptychs come from ten series taken over 50 years, although in fact only one, 'Yesterday's Sandwich', predates the collapse of the regime, and its ironies are thunkingly unsubtle: a pastel portrait framed in slabs of meat; a sky that resembles cracked river ice, beneath which two women loiter next to a slogan that translates as 'the glory of labour!' Then again, subtlety is clearly, to Mikhailov, an overrated attribute. He prefers nudity and vulgarity, colour and raw crisis.

A man wears a wedding veil, another bares his chest to the snow, a third appears, ghostly, beneath a woman's naked behind (it's a tribute to Man Ray. Maybe.) He is ill-served by the absence of information accompanying his images (although there are books to flick through), but given that his sensibility appears to be that of a bomzh, perhaps being ill-served is part of the point.