This spring, the Graves Gallery welcomes the first solo exhibition by acclaimed Sheffield-based artist Ryan Mosley. When the Day is Done presents 20 of Mosley’s new works weaving together characters and place, reality and fiction, the everyday and the exotic.
Explorations of character and narrative are central to Mosley’s work, with his paintings appearing to draw back a curtain and invite the viewer into a fiction abstracted from fact, familiar yet out of kilter. The mundane is often rendered fantastical through counterpoints of location, colour or motif, which remove the work from its foundation in reality.
The characters encountered in Mosley’s paintings reflect our very real need to connect with each other and the landscape around us. Whether revealing musicians in night clubs or individuals dwarfed by the enormity of the natural world, each of the paintings he creates sees the human condition scrutinised through his painter’s lens.
The Graves Gallery itself played a formative role in Mosley’s early artistic development. It was during a visit there as a teenager that he first encountered Patrick Caulfield’s The Hermit and was struck by Caulfield’s economic use of line and colour, and his approach to visual language, and the possibilities they represented.
Mosley has generously created a limited edition print ‘Winter’s Son’ (2026) to accompany the exhibition, available only in person from the Graves Gallery. All proceeds will support Sheffield Museums’ work as a charity bringing the best in art to the city and celebrating the region’s remarkable creative talent.
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