LONDON, ENGLAND.- The Stuckists shocked the art world last month when their anti-Tate campaign, previously seen as jokey clown demos, forced a humiliating apology from Sir Nicholas Serota, after a Charity Commission ruling that the Tate had acted illegally over purchases of Trustee work.

Spectrum London gallery now sets out to prove that the Stuckists’ paintings should be taken as seriously as their politics, with Go West, the group’s first ever show in a commercial West End gallery.

In another sign that the art world is turning its back on “slumming it” in East End backstreets, as Britart’s White Cube prepares its new premises in St James’s, the YBAs’ arch-enemies, the pro-painting Stuckists, have closed their own Shoreditch gallery to go west.

Royden Prior, Director of Spectrum London, said, “These artists are good, and are part of art history. Get past the art politics and look at the work” – an opinion already endorsed by a national museum, the Walker Art Gallery, who gave the Stuckists a major five-month show during the 2004 Liverpool Biennial.

Now academic status is being awarded during this year’s Liverpool Biennial with an international symposium The Triumph of Stuckism at John Moores Liverpool University. (The Stuckists have been credited by noted critic, Edward Lucie-Smith, for influencing Charles Saatchi’s return to painting.)

Go West at Spectrum London features paintings by 10 leading members of the Stuckists group, headed by founder Charles Thomson, some of whose work is explicit images of his ex-wife Stella Vine’s former life as a stripper.

Raw autobiographical painter Joe Machine paints the paranoid after-effects of witnessing pornography and knife fights as a child. The confident burlesque titillation of ex Go-go dancer Ella Guru’s images of London’s demimonde are set off by portraits of Nigella Lawson and Charlotte Church, painted meticulously with a sable brush by punk guitarist Paul Harvey, formerly of the band Penetration.

Peter McArdle is an obsessive artist, who lives in an unheated Northumberland farmhouse and works with Renaissance glazing techniques in his attic studio from 4 am, seven days a week. Philip Absolon was rejected from art school and paints unemployed skeletons. Elsa Dax, Eamon Everall, Wolf Howard and Bill Lewis range from a neo-cubistically divided mother and child, through Diana bathing to God Is an Atheist – She Doesn’t Believe in Me.