Looking, Slowly by Graham Lister

Title: Looking, Slowly
Year: 2025
Artist: Graham Lister
Medium: oil on wood (unframed)
Size: 21 cm x 30 cm x 3.5 cm

Graham Lister (b. 1982) lives in Glasgow, Scotland. In 2016 he completed a Practice-based PhD at Glasgow School of Art (GSA) where he now works as a lecturer in Painting and Printmaking. He also has a MFA from Gray's School of Art, Aberdeen, and an MA in Art History from Glasgow University. 

Exhibited in group shows in New York, London, Seoul and Beijing, Lister's paintings focus on breaking down physical forms, textures and surfaces. Balancing structured and intuitive abstraction processes, he investigates visual patterns, handwriting and representations of brush strokes. 

"Over recent months, I’ve been returning again and again to a group of paintings that linger in my mind, and have always seemed like a constant visual presence for me. The works in question include Renaissance altarpieces, works by Nabis painters and some wonderful figurative abstractions. Certainly, on the surface they don’t share a common thread, and I suppose it’s not a sense of commonality I’ve been looking for. Rather, its been the activity of looking, of long, careful time spent with reproductions of these works that has helped me scratch a little below the surface of them. Works such as ‘Can’t see the wood for the trees’ and all that are examples of me getting to know what I love and admire all over again; they are skin to fresh starts or new days with old friends or old views.

"I’m submitting these works because, for me, they connect with long, slow looking processes– an activity that seems so at odds within an era characterised by rapid scrolling. They act as invitations to look and to linger, to notice and perhaps form ideas of legible shapes. They are quiet painted surfaces, but ones on which the marks made, the brushstrokes and drawn gestures are definite – they themselves don’t hide away – they are there to be seen if you know where to look."