Mike Silva at Mead Gallery
1st May, 2025 – 2nd July, 2025
Mead Gallery
Warwick Arts Centre
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
A Personal Archive in Paint: New Works by Mike Silva at The Mead Gallery
The Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new and recent paintings by London-based artist Mike Silva.
Silva (b. 1970, Sandviken, Sweden) creates portraits, interiors, still lifes, and landscapes drawn from an ongoing personal archive of photographic material. Much of this archive, rooted in London during the 1990s and early 2000s, is displayed in his studio as an evolving constellation of printed photographs—tacked, taped, grid-lined, and painted. These images act as a flexible source that Silva draws from instinctively, gradually shifting their subjects from photographic to painted space.
Image courtesy of Mead Gallery
Through his ability to capture subtle shifts of light and shadow within moments that are quietly and intimately observed, Silva moves beyond photorealism. His gestural application of paint and generous use of white imbue the works with a hazy, atmospheric quality—emphasising both the fleeting nature of the scenes depicted and the impermanence of memory itself. Each composition holds a tension between the instantaneous nature of a captured photo and the slow, deliberate process of translating that image into paint.
Encountering Silva’s work becomes a physical and meditative experience: while we may recognise certain signals from a past moment, his rendering of these images on canvas re-crystallises memory in the act of looking, creating a sense of timelessness that resonates across his oeuvre.
The exhibition at the Mead Gallery brings together new and recent paintings, including portraits, interiors, and landscapes. These works feature acquaintances, friends, and lovers—both past and present—as well as the domestic and private spaces they have inhabited. Several paintings also foreground light itself as a compositional protagonist, including a new landscape depicting dappled sunlight filtering through a parkland enclosure—once a known cruising ground in North London. Together, this selection of works conjures people and places of times past, evoked through peripheral moments activated within the gallery space.
A fully illustrated publication will accompany the exhibition, featuring an extended interview between Silva and Joseph Constable, Head of Exhibitions at the De La Warr Pavilion, along with a text by artist, editor, and writer Sean Burns. Organised by the Mead Gallery in collaboration with the De La Warr Pavilion—where the exhibition first opened in autumn 2024—this presentation includes several previously unexhibited or entirely new paintings.
Mike Silva opens on the 1st of May, 2025 until the 2nd of July, 2025 at The Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre
©2025 The Mead Gallery
Art Plugged is a contemporary platform inspired by a relationship with the broader arts communities. We provide our audience with curated insight into the world of art, from exhibitions to artist interviews and more.
