Graham Durward: What can I do about my dreams

April 26 - June 7, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 26, 6-9 PM

13 Monroe Street and 19 Monroe Street, New York, NY

What can I do about my dreams

In Graham Durward’s paintings, objects and figures on the periphery become central to his visionary agenda.

Images and other elements are most likely apparitions.

Intimacy and light vie with these visual intrusions, even when they are violent or unwelcome.

Contamination is inevitable, accommodated into the greater scheme of things.

For Durward, the painting must present as an accumulation of events, becoming as one. 

Painting becomes the conduit to possibilities. These are not paintings of sensibilities triggered by memories or sentiment. Yet, there is tenderness. 

“Lately I’ve been reading my mothers handwritten recipes for oatcakes, chocolate cake, and millionaire's shortbread. The immediacy and elegance of the cursive script has trapped her spirit like the gestures of a paint brush. The lists of ingredients remain quotidian yet  become achingly human.

The Harlequin intrudes as a jester of the paint brush

Why does nearly all contemporary figuration look like a damn cartoon?

These paintings run back and forth through various time zones

Often contradictory, is it critical for painting to entertain oppositions of style and meanings or just art that reflects the vicissitudes of life, as opposed to the fountainhead of the ego.

There is no distinction between fantasy and reality, figure or abstraction, the studio is a train station of arrivals and departures, cancellations, and delays. Slow and fast commutes.

Themes prevail in generalized or specific moments of rapture, yearning for a more innocent time of flowers and blue skies but encountering a more brutal reality on the way.

Ultimately these paintings address the things that drive us in art as in life. 

Fantasies turning into truths.

They are rarely autobiographical.” – Graham Durward