Born in 1973, Graham Swift studied art at the Roehampton Institute before becoming an artist full-time in 2004. Since then he has been selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, National Open Art Competition and short-listed for the Jerwood Drawing prize.
Graham has always been drawn to the human form and self portraiture. As he explains, it is his own 'fascination with the complexity of the self-image... (and) its truly exposed nature -looking from within to within,' that has become the starting point and central theme in both his painting and drawing.
In his most recent sequence of paintings VEIL (2012 - 2013) Graham writes, 'the structure of the face is dispelled as a membrane to peer through not at, as if it acts as a barrier between the physical and the metaphysical state hiding behind. The images provide a manipulated presence, pulled taught and distorted, too reticent to be wholly solid yet too permanent to be entirely transparent.'
Similarly Graham's series of drawings Ecdysis, (2010 - 2013), titled after the scientific name for the process of shedding the outer skin, a fragment discarded, are studies 'charting the memory of a moment in time where it is outgrown and superfluous.'
'Whilst continuing to examine the transparent nature of self, these works also question the significance of the state of our own skin, the relation and effect it has to our being, and ultimately how we interact with those around us.'
Graham has always been drawn to the human form and self portraiture. As he explains, it is his own 'fascination with the complexity of the self-image... (and) its truly exposed nature -looking from within to within,' that has become the starting point and central theme in both his painting and drawing.
In his most recent sequence of paintings VEIL (2012 - 2013) Graham writes, 'the structure of the face is dispelled as a membrane to peer through not at, as if it acts as a barrier between the physical and the metaphysical state hiding behind. The images provide a manipulated presence, pulled taught and distorted, too reticent to be wholly solid yet too permanent to be entirely transparent.'
Similarly Graham's series of drawings Ecdysis, (2010 - 2013), titled after the scientific name for the process of shedding the outer skin, a fragment discarded, are studies 'charting the memory of a moment in time where it is outgrown and superfluous.'
'Whilst continuing to examine the transparent nature of self, these works also question the significance of the state of our own skin, the relation and effect it has to our being, and ultimately how we interact with those around us.'