The new Knighton Hosking exhibition at Churchill College may be compact but the show delivers intensity and meaning through a brilliant and varied aesthetic display. In this multifarious show there are sculptures, Chinese ink drawings, art historical documents and oil paintings.

Hosking was formally trained at London Central School of Art and Design in 1966, and participated in the ground-breaking ‘New Generation’ sculpture show of 1965, organised by Bryan Robertson, sometime director of the Whitechapel and Tate Gallery. The New Generation Show introduced a group of sculptors who broke the boundaries of artistic practise through their ground-breaking use of technology and innovative acrylic paints, practices that are evident in the works by Hosking displayed in this exhibition.

Many of Hosking’s works are loaded with personal historical value; the most poignant of which pay regard to the tragic period in the artist’s life when his son died of a brain tumour. One work, Poisoned Moon, depicts a cast bronze cross that stands upright, starkly lit against an obscure background, wherein the faint outlines of headstones loom out from the shadows. The painting, full of signifiers of death, is set on the moors near the artist’s home, a place dotted with crosses which became emblems for his son, just as the clouds themselves became similes for headstones.

Another painting, Remembrance Of Things Lost, a photo-realist depiction of a silvery grey wooden shelf, with a heavily impasto painted bunch of flowers, alludes forcibly to the bleakness of grief and the pitiful ceremony of buying flowers as an offering of mourning. Despite the obviously morbid allusions contained in these works, the curator insists that Hosking does not see the creation of these works as a kind of therapy for grief or fears of death, but rather as “a means to raise questions about what it means to be – or not to be.”

The striking application of paint in Remembrance... in which, by thickly applying the paint in the depiction of the bunch of flowers, the painter creates a kind of third dimension to the painting, links the artist to the masters whose practise he admires, namely Goya, Rembrandt and Grunewald, a fascinating panoply of Renaissance and Early Modern artists.

The artist explores the idea of creating new surfaces and depiction of space, an exploration that recurs in some of his more naturalistic works. Separating the Eighth from the Ninth, 2009, appears to be a kind of chemical attack on nature. Bright sulphurous spots obscure parts of tree trunks, which the viewer can vaguely observe through snowy gauze that is made high-octane through acidic tints. The effect of the stippled chemical-colour drops in the foreground of this picture, as well as in Oasis, give weight to Barry Phipps’s comment that the artist is a kind of ‘alchemist’, but also vividly actualize the artist’s intention to explore pictorial space, and more particularly to depict the space “that is as much in front of your nose as it is in the depth of perspectival space.”

This exhibition is charged by a startling aesthetic which serves to amplify, rather than belie the inherent profundity and pathos of the works.