A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep

A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep
A solo exhibition by Graham Silveria Martin

Opening Reception: 13 November 2025, 6-8pm

Exhibition text by Tom Denman

'A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep' brings together a series of new drawings and paintings by Graham Silveria Martin which explore themes of connection, desire, trace and collective memory. Silveria Martin typically works with found imagery, from film, print media and online sources, with many of these images being appropriated from gay magazines from the late 1970s and early 1980s. For his most recent body of work, Silveria Martin sources predominantly from 'Blueboy', a monthly men's magazine published from 1974 to 2007. The magazine takes its name from the Thomas Gainsborough painting, c. 1770.

Silveria Martin began working with this imagery while studying at the Royal College of Art and was drawn to it as it represents a moment of gay liberation that preceded the devastating impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. While taking this period as a point of departure, he reframes historical narratives through personal observations, shared sensibilities and his own evolving understanding of signifiers of same-sex love and desire across time.

The Greco-Roman references and compositions in these magazines prompted Silveria Martin to respond to Renaissance and Neoclassical sculptures in the V&A's Collection that he felt held a certain queer erotic charge. Through this alternative lens, Silveria Martin prompts consideration of the receptive male body, versus the impenetrable nature of stone-carved male forms. During visits to the museum, he discovered the work of Lord Frederick Leighton, becoming aware of a shared sensibility in Leighton’s work. This led him to focus on other artists of the period, such as Simeon Solomon, who shared aestheticist ideals in his celebration of ideal beauty and of beauty as something intrinsically valuable. 

In this recent body of work, Silveria Martin's interests span Victorian, Edwardian and Modernist painters, including Leighton, Solomon, John Singer Sargent and Duncan Grant, as well as old master sculptors like Michelangelo, Giambologna, Canova, Bernini and Foggini. Silveria Martin's new works in the exhibition will be shown alongside drawings by Grant from the 1950s.

The paintings in the exhibition exemplify Silveria Martin’s ongoing exploration of image making and painting as process. The starting point for each work involves applying primer with large squeegees creating depth and texture, before staining the canvas to develop the ground, whilst using an economy of more precise brushstrokes and mark making to transcribe information from his source imagery. He consciously varies his engagement with the canvas, oscillating between viewing it as a flat surface and focusing on specific areas, blending process and the seemingly superimposed image.

Artist Biography

Graham Silveria Martin (b.1983) is a Scottish artist living and working in London. He graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Painting in 2021 following studies at Edinburgh University (2003-2007), and Edinburgh College of Art (2001-2003). Solo presentations of his work include Closer Still, GROVE, London (2024), Talisman, Incubator, London (2023), and Portals, Huxley-Parlour, London (2022). Selected group shows include Time + Place, Huxley-Parlour, London (2024), Outside of History, The Who Gallery, London (2023), Stilled Images, Tube Gallery, Palma de Mallorca (2023), Painting With Light, Vortic Curated & Wardour Street, London (2023), Glitches in Love: a new formula, Tokyo University of the Arts, Tokyo (2023), Internal Weather, Sid Motion Gallery, London (2022), London Grads Now, Saatchi Gallery, London (2021), Tomorrow 2021, White Cube, London (2021), Burra & Friends, Rye Art Gallery, Rye (2021), The Weird and the Eerie, Hockney Gallery, London (2020), RBA Rising Stars, Royal Over-Seas League, London (2019), John Moores Painting Prize, Walker Museum, Liverpool (2018), The Columbia Threadneedle Prize, Mall Galleries, London (2016, 2018), Figurative Art Now, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (2016), and The John Ruskin Prize, New Art Gallery, Walsall (2016). He is a recipient of the Huxley-Parlour FOUR x THREE Grant (2022), the Jerwood Arts 1:1 FUND Grant (2021), the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2020) and the Hope Scott Trust Visual Arts Grant (2020). Since 2021, he and his partner Carlos have run Trafalgar Avenue, an artist-led gallery and project space in Southeast London.