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

The exhibition will be accompanied by a text by Tom Denman.

Graham Silveria Martin explores themes of connection, desire, trace and memory. He typically works with found imagery from film, print media and online sources. Many of these images are appropriated from gay lifestyle and porn magazines - predominantly American - from the late 1970s and early 1980s. For his most recent body of work, Silveria Martin sources from 'Blueboy', a monthly gay men's magazine published from 1974 to 2007. The magazine took its name from the Thomas Gainsborough painting, c. 1770.

Silveria Martin began using this imagery while at the Royal College of Art, and was drawn to it as it represents a period of gay liberation that preceded the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The images were created by gay men for gay men - and were thus free from the external negative narratives or censorship of the time.

Silveria Martin also incorporates objects and ephemera with emotional resonance from within his source images, exploring tensions and coded exchanges in these scenes and their dialogue with his figurative work. 

While starting from this period, Silveria Martin 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, and a recent trip to Rome prompted Silveria Martin to explore sculptures that he felt held a certain queer erotic charge in the V&A's Collection. 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, like Simeon Solomon, who shared aesthetic ideals in their celebration of ideal beauty and of beauty as something intrinsically valuable. Through this alternative gaze, Silveria Martin prompts consideration of the receptive desirable male body,  versus the impenetrable nature of stone-carved male forms.

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 Giambologna, Canova, Michelangelo, Bernini and Foggini. Silveria Martin's new works in the exhibition will be shown alongside erotic drawings by Grant from the 50s.

Silveria Martin’s artistic process involves applying primer with large squeegees  creating depth and texture, then 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.