IT MAY not be the Turner Prize, but the current exhibition at Newport Museum and Art Gallery will challenge the way you think about art.

And while there may not be any blow-up dolls cast in bronze, tedious video installations or vandalized Goya etchings, there is work to make anyone marvel.

Preston-born Alan Salisbury has produced a witty and beautiful series of paintings which draw equally on his interest in football and the Old Masters of the 15th and 16th century.

The goalkeeper, a figure rarely praised but often lambasted for failure, takes the role of the medieval saints in a series of canvases which laugh at our obsession with football while giving the game its proper respect.

Ebbw Vale-born sculptor Graham Talbot, interviewed in the Argus last week, has focused on the elements of the air in the series on show. Steel birds linked in a tumbling spiral of light contrast against the expressive sky studies around the walls in a compelling installation.

Christopher Nurse's paintings look at the confluences between the worlds of children and adults, with a series of paintings of sculptures of still lives made from biscuits and vegetables depicting biblical scenes, or adult structures made from 1950s building blocks.

The artist said: "The series of Nativity paintings explore a tension between form and content. The Nativity has been lost as a subject of high art and is now more commonly represented through craft and childish materials, knitting, gingerbread, raffia, pipe-cleaners, plasticine, plastic toy figures, sweet-papers and glitter.

"By turning these representation into paintings I can complete the circle." And German-born Frances Woodley, who has studied art in Bath, Cardiff and Manchester, works in ceramics and mixed media to bring the viewer into her sculptures and to consider their relationships to common-or-garden objects.

The Free Association show continues until November 17.