Graham, Dylan

Dylan Graham was born in 1977 in Pretoria South Africa. He received a degree in Fine Arts from Pretoria Technikon (now Tshwane University of Technology) in 2000 and he completed his Masters degree in Fine Art at the University of Pretoria in 2022.

He paints what may appear to be banal subjects: faces, figures, brooms, cages, tools, books, seemingly chosen at random from what exists around him. Even though his paintings are predominantly figurative and representative, he has a serious focus on the tactile and expressive qualities of paint, and a great interest in abstract ideas about the act of painting. As a result, every painting is both image and simply paint, substance and shadow, the seen and the unseen, the exactly representative, and the hardly suggested. They thus make one sense the past, (as in hints of traditional painting) and the present as it comes into being, and even the future that is only hinted at. They are steeped in ambiguity and dualities, and make the viewer’s act of seeing feel new.