Graham Lister is an artist based in Glasgow, Scotland. He currently teaches at the Glasgow School of Art.

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My ongoing painting practice focuses on breaking down physical forms, surfaces and textures. The work encompasses an interplay between structured and intuitive gradual abstractions; investigating processes of slow looking and the distillation of glimpses and gestures through painting. My work is also positioned as an attempt to foreground the highs and lows of studio practices – inviting consideration of periods of working/ not working/ not knowing what to do.

I’m interested in thinking about how artists make, exhibit, re-work, love and hate what they do. Recent semi-abstracted paintings have focused on repeated mark-making, cursive script and have zoomed-in on small aspects of previous pieces … trying to get to the bottom of what it is about them that seems to ‘work’.

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In what ways do specific repetitive and process-driven mark-making strategies foreground and challenge the meditative, durational aspects of artistic production?

How does the strategy of employing iterative mark-making techniques allow for exploration of persistence, variation and error within painting, and what does this reveal about the role of process in contemporary abstraction?

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Solo exhibitions in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester and Berlin have made use of painting and drawing processes as well as ambitious, large-scale, expanded installations. I have also exhibited work widely in recent group shows including in New York, London, Seoul and Beijing, and have been included in the 2025 John Moores Painting Prize.

My interests also relate to consideration of what the artist studio represents; what it means to operate in a painting/ creative space and how the very idea of the studio offers positive possibilities for making, but equally can also represent a barrier to creative development. As an artist who ‘thinks through making’, the development of visual research is connected to the process of exhibiting work in different contexts – in order to better comprehend how the seemingly abstract pushing and pulling of pigment on substrate can connect with, or can refer to, quite unexpected tactile physical experiences.

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PhD (Practice-based) - The Glasgow School of Art
FHEA - Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
MFA - Gray's School of Art
MA (Art History) - The University of Glasgow