Meaningful pop art

Liz Arnold, who died in 2001, made work which is a kind of Pop Art but has a meaningful social agenda. She took the traditional vehicle for visual satire - the anthropomorphic cartoon - and jammed it within the fine-art context of easel painting. The problem with - or indeed the beauty of - her work is that the meaning of her social agenda is unspecified. Like most satirists, there's a dystopian vision beneath the fun; Arnold's humour is built upon such droll amusements as post-industrial toxicity, malign sexualisation, illness, mutation, alienation and violence. It all takes place in gloriously poisoned 1970s colours too, and is truly intense.

Neal Brown