FLOWERS have begun to spring from the enigmatic abstract paintings of Sibylle Ungers. The painter's familiar compositional style, with its stern geometrics and sudden passages of meandering, runny dissolution, is still here. Now, however, perched on her hard edges, Ungers is likely to plant a spilling bed of multicolour roses (for the most part) painted in the streaky whorls of a delicate impressionistic manner.

It is an odd trick Ungers is performing. In another context, such lurches into figuration might be taken as a wry, even smart arsed commentary on contemporary painting and its overwhelming sense of knowingness. But such glibness does not seem to be what Ungers is after, which is, in a way, a pity.

To get away with so much prettiness, these paintings would need a great deal of cheeky urbanity; Ungers's tone, however, seems to be an alarming first degree. The mood bobs unpredictably between the strained festivity of vivid colour and something," macabre, hinted at by the general title the paintings all share, Concrete Garden.

These pictures are, of course, slightly less of a surprise than they might have been. Ungers has frequently had a sense of two struggling elements within her painting. Previously, she negotiated two different approaches to abstraction - one favouring control, the other chance - within the same canvas. Now it seems that even that fundamental discord is not loud enough, and an extra element must be added in. Setting up confusion in such a studied manner, however, cannot help but give the impression of a painter in search of something to say.