Graham Lister (b.1982) is a painter and researcher based in Glasgow, Scotland. In 2016, he completed a Practice-based PhD at the Glasgow School of Art.

His ongoing painting practice is concerned with using the activity of painting as a way of distilling physical forms, surfaces, textures and repeated patterns. His work encompasses an interplay between structured and intuitive gradual abstraction processes which investigate visual patterns, motifs and surface materialities which often go unnoticed within our everyday lives. Recent solo exhibitions in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester and Berlin have made use of painting and drawing processes as well as ambitious, large-scale, expanded installations. He has also exhibited work very widely in recent group shows in New York, London, Swansea and Sheffield.

Current ongoing research relates to consideration of what the artist studio represents; what it means to operate in a painting/ creative studio and how the very idea of the studio offers positive possibilities for making, but equally can also represent a barrier to creative creation.

As an artist who ‘thinks through making’, the development of research is connected to the process of exhibiting work – in order to better comprehend the ways that the work itself operates, and the ideas that it might connect with.

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Prior to his PhD at the GSA, he studied at Gray's School of Art, studying on the MFA programme, and at the University of Glasgow, gaining an MA(Hons) in Art History. He worked at the GSA from 2008 - 2015 (Historical and Critical Studies and Painting and Printmaking), and then at the University of Huddersfield 2015 - 2017 (Contemporary Art).

Returning to Glasgow in 2017, he has worked as a Lecturer in Painting and Printmaking and as a Tutor for the Widening Participation programme at the GSA.