The centrepiece of the exhibition at Britain’s only contemporary art gallery in a prison is an installation, consisting of two broken, stained armchairs. They’ve been placed face-to-face, as if for a therapy session. Elsewhere there are silkscreen prints and paintings. This outbuilding-cum-art studio and gallery is where prisoners are also taught dry-point etching – surprising given the needles involved, but I am assured that all potential weapons are accounted for at the end of each session.

‘For two hours a week I come here and learn new skills,’ explains the silkscreen artist and inmate of HMP Grendon. ‘I get completely absorbed in printmaking. I feel freer here than any other time in prison. I’ve recaptured my childhood love for art.’

His one regret about what he calls Grendon’s art project is that there are no opportunities for life drawing in the flesh. ‘We don’t have access to the internet here, so we rely on life-drawing DVDs. That’s how you educate yourself about structure and body position. But when you think about it, there are lots of men here who’ve spent a lot of time in the gym building their bodies, so it feels like a missed opportunity not to be able to draw them.’

As he talks, I imagine that the resultant drawings would command tidy sums if this contemporary art gallery had a gift shop. But of course as Grendon is a category B prison, there is no gift shop and entry to the exhibition is more restrictive than the most exclusive private view. On the plus side, admission is much cheaper than a trip to the Royal Academy.

HMP Grendon was founded in 1962 as a therapeutic prison. To be transferred to Grendon, prisoners have to admit their crimes and be approved not just by the governor but also their peers. Successful applicants live in one of five so-called therapeutic communities and if released are less likely to reoffend than those in the rest of the prison population. ‘In our survey,’ reported HM chief inspector of prisons Peter Clarke in his 2017 report on Grendon,‘87 per cent of men told us they had done something at Grendon that made them less likely to reoffend in the future, against the comparator of 57 per cent.’

All of the 200-plus men here, each serving a long or life sentence, spend much of the day in various kinds of therapy.

‘Drama therapy is part of that. So you might wind up wearing a neutral mask to hide your identity and then discuss what that felt like,’ another prisoner explains. ‘And then there’s art therapy. You might draw someone or something and then discuss what it is in group therapy. Some guy sitting next to you in the group might ask you about the significance of a specific colour in terms of your crime. That’s very different to what we do here in the workshop, which is about learning about contemporary art and learning new skills. It’s also about expressing yourself.’

I’m visiting Building Eight at the invitation of Birmingham’s Ikon art gallery and the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust for a singular phenomenon: a contemporary art private view in jail.

There are several knotty moral conundrums at the heart of prison art. That it exists at all today – in our era of condemnation and cancellation – is a small miracle. When violent criminals or sexual abusers turn to art in prison, the press are usually outraged. But if art and artist are inseparable – as the artistic establishment demands we now believe – perhaps outrage is the correct response. Should the art of criminals be divorced from their crimes?

Britain’s most notorious criminal Charles Bronson kidnapped his art teacher in HMP Hull in 1999 and threatened to murder him. He later changed his name to Charles Salvador in homage to his favourite artist, won awards from the Koestler Trust and in March told his parole hearing: ‘I have found my true self through my art. I’ve swapped the sawn-off shotgun for the sawn-off paintbrush.’ To own an original Bronson print will set you back almost £6,000 on Ebay.

At Grendon, prisoners can’t sell their works through the Ikon’s programme, though they can win cash prizes through the Koestler Trust awards, though even then half of the winnings go to victim’s charities.

The irony is that the people who encourage those who’ve done bad things to take up art are often the same people demanding other artists who’ve done bad things be forced to give up their art.

Consider this: if Roman Polanski had been jailed for rape and signed up to learn dry-point etching, would not the very people who today say his superb films should be cancelled also support the exhibition of his etchings as part of his rehabilitation?

In the show I’ve come to see, called There is No Masterpiece, prisoners’ works are presented anonymously. How would I feel if I found the chair installation had been made by, say, Gary Glitter? Would I be able to continue to consider it, as I had been, a clever conceptual piece, something Tracey Emin or Sarah Lucas might have created had they done time? With most art, a signature confers status; in this case, it might remove it.

In our unforgiving age, where cyberspace pile-ons take the shape of the eviscerating mobs at public hangings, the question of whether we believe in atonement and rehabilitation is inescapable. For the prisoner-artists I meet, many jailed for crimes such as murder and armed robbery, the really vexing question is whether they can ever rebuild their reputations, still less have their names attached to artworks without their criminal pasts determining how they are seen.

Dean Kelland, for the past four years Grendon’s artist-in-residence (which makes him sound as if he’s been imprisoned for the duration, whereas in reality he heads home to Birmingham after work), tells me that the artist behind the chair installation was inspired to create the piece by the Japanese art of kintsugi, which involves repairing broken pottery with precious metal such as liquid gold, thereby highlighting the fractures rather than erasing them. ‘I told him it’s a type of mending that involves embellishing damaged objects with gold material which the artist has translated into textile. That really catalysed him to make this piece. He was into embroidery but never considered himself an installation artist before. But he got permission to recycle two broken chairs, which he then set to work on.’

On the walls around us are works by prisoners alongside those by visiting artists. The works were mostly inspired by artworks from a recent exhibition at the Ikon Gallery about Edward Lear’s landscape drawings and verse. There’s a suite of silkscreen prints entitled ‘Transient Moments’ (2021) by one of the professional artists, Fae Kilburn. She feels kinship with Grendon’s prisoners: ‘In another time, several of the artists would have been in jail or in institutions themselves.’

The Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust has funded art at HMP Grendon for the past 12 years. It was set up after the death of Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, an Austrian-Jewish emigrée artist who fled Nazism. Frances Carey, chair of the trust, tells me that several of von Motesiczky’s paintings have been or will be displayed in the gallery at Grendon to offer inspiration to prisoners. One of them, the austerely beautiful ‘From Night Into Day’, depicts the artist’s 93-year-old mother Henriette in her bed in Hampstead. ‘The title relates to the fact that von Motesiczky’s mother found difficulty in sleeping and often lay awake as night became day,’ explains the Tate Britain caption. A difficulty, one can readily imagine, that those detained at His Majesty’s pleasure often share.