Derek Jarman: Brutal Beauty, curated by film-maker Isaac Julien, is a moving yet unsentimental exhibition, as were so many of Jarman’s works themselves. And how apt the title, for who else has created such beauty from the unrelenting brutality of a disease such as AIDS. In the first room of the gallery we sense that this is an artist who explored death as much as he did life. A selection of Jarman’s sculptural paintings, which preserve found objects in tar, cover one wall. Aesthetically, these intricate pieces are beautiful, but their unified message points to the omnipresence of death and the passing of time. Similarly, Jarman’s three ‘Bed’ installations – in which porn meets Plato – are not just funny, but dark and sinister. The autobiographical connotations of the late painting ‘Fuck Me Blind’ send shivers down your spine.

Interspersed between these works are a collection of photographic lightboxes, produced by Julien, portraying Jarman’s cottage and garden in Dungeness, where he spent the last part of his life. These are poignant, for in the midst of our witnessing something tragic, we are reminded of Jarman’s enthusiasm for life. In 1987, a year after his HIV diagnosis, he moved to Kent, where he took joy and comfort in gardening and the simplicities of nature. Juxtaposed against works in which Jarman explicitly conveys his trauma, Julien’s lightboxes – in celebrating one of the artists’s favourite places – give a softer touch to the atmosphere of the exhibition.

Jarman’s last film Blue is given its own room. The all-consuming blue screen, inspired by Yves Klein’s monochromes, is the continuous backdrop for a seventy-five minute voiceover by Jarman, in which he speaks lyrically and honestly about the ravages of AIDS, the loss of his friends, and his own untimely death. Blue – the colour of the sky, of water – becomes the colour of blindness, of grief, and of Heaven, perhaps.

In the next room Julien has created a compilation of Jarman’s Super-8 films, many of which are being shown for the first time since the 1970s – an appropriate homage to the artist’s early creativity, and his position in the history of British independent cinema.

Central to the exhibition is Julien’s own film Derek, a beautiful celebration of the artist’s life. As well as featuring clips from some of Jarman’s classic films, and an impassioned narrative by his friend and muse, Tilda Swinton, Derek also includes intimate footage from a day long interview that Jarman did with Colin MacCabe in 1990. As can only be expected from Isaac Julien, the film is intellectually and emotionally engaging; and not only does it serve as a sensitive insight into Jarman the man, but simultaneously looks at England from the 1950s through to the 1990s.

Derek Jarman: Brutal Beauty forms a major part of a season dedicated to the artist. And for this reviewer - too young to see the work the first time round – this exhibition seems a fitting tribute to an artist and a philosopher whose theme was always mortality and ideas.

Till 13 April 2008.