From two coat racks made of metal piping, rows of sports jackets – in denim, wool, and cotton – hang on plastic coat hangers alongside trench coats, fluorescent safety vests, woollen scarves and chequered trousers. A dozen or so tiny leather gloves are fixed to a hanger with clothes pins.

Each item of clothing tells a story. Many of the Men's Suits and jackets, for example, have loud patterns and strong colours that suggest their owners would not have been wealthy or sophisticated men. You can also see how cheaply made many of the garments are, probably in Third World sweatshops before being sold to poor but not indigent people. Now they are being recycled for men trapped on an even lower rung of American society.

The settings, too, were made by LeDray, including the dirty, scuffed and patched linoleum floor and the low ceiling with its harsh fluorescent lights.

Because we look down on each scene we can see something those who might work in the room can’t – that above the ceiling, the surface is covered in a thick coating of dust – which I’m told the artist brought specially from America on the assumption that British dust is different to the kind you find in the Bowery.

There is nothing beautiful or comforting about any of this, yet as soon as we crouch down to examine the work closely we find ourselves lost in wonder both at the power of the artist’s imagination and his obsessive attention to detail – the minute zippers that work, the tiny hand-made button lying on the old ironing board, the way the fabric, texture and cut of each coat or pair of trousers is entirely different to the one next to it. When LeDray makes a Lilliputian-sized man’s tie (and there must be a hundred of them in this show) he doesn’t just take scissors to cut down a real tie, because the scale of the original pattern would look ridiculous on something so small. He must begin, like a real designer, from scratch.

The way LeDray uses scale is one of the subtlest things about the work. Had the clothes been any smaller the piece might easily have looked precious, a contemporary artist’s answer to Queen Mary’s dollhouse. But working on the scale he does allows him to give us a lot of information about the absent or dead owners.

A pall of sadness hangs over Men's Suits. Unwanted clothing stands in for lost lives and failed dreams. Pay attention, too, to LeDray’s unerring sense of design. Step back and you’ll see how he uses the shape, colour and texture of the ladder, ironing board, wooden palettes and cloth laundry trolleys as formal elements in his compositions, balancing vertical lines with horizontals, and rhyming diagonals in one corner with those in another. Accents of colour punctuate each immensely satisfying composition.

LeDray’s work has been compared to that of contemporaries such as Robert Gober and Mike Kelley, but although I can see many areas in which these artists share an interest in common themes, like social and economic class, for me the most helpful context in which to view him is as the heir to American realist artists of the Depression era. Though he never represents the human figure, the world he shows us is the city life that Reginald Marsh would have recognised. He looks with infinite compassion on the belongings of the dispossessed and the down and out, the downside of the American dream.

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Men's Suits