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After graduating, Grahame Parry spent the majority of the subsequent sixteen years living and working in Cyprus, initially as a post-graduate student at the Cyprus College of Art but shortly after as a member of the College's staff. Benefiting greatly from working alongside the college's inspirational founder and Principal, Stass Paraskos, his time in this remote corner of the Mediterranean was a highly formative experience. For the last few years of his stay he was employed as the Programme Leader for the college's Foundation Course and his work is now represented in the country's State Collection of Contemporary Art as well as other public collections in Limassol and Nicosia.

Since returning to the UK in 2006 he has been based in Devon, but he has retained his connections in Cyprus and continues to work with the Morfi Gallery in Limassol.

Artist's Statement

Taking as its starting point the iconography of advertising, Grahame Parry's work is an invitation to focus on the idealized and generally sexualized version of reality we are all so persistently encouraged to buy into.

Slick, sensual and at times overtly erotic, this staple diet of glossy images relentlessly flaunts their promise of fulfillment and aim to seduce through the employment of fantasy. The temptation to fashion its own response to such stimuli appears to have been irresistible.

This apparent cultural obsession with seduction finds an echo in his own works. Through the employment of photorealist elements, high-key colour and decorative detail, he aims to seduce the viewer and retain their gaze, an initially superficial engagement that he hopes gives way to a desire to explore a more complex narrative that lies beneath this sensual veneer.

Parry's paintings are based on contrast and contradiction. Appropriating images from a wide range of sources he takes pleasure in lifting figures from their original context and placing them in a new pictorial environment in an effort to employ them in an alternative narrative. The visual language he has developed also reinforces this idea of contradiction, with black and white images being thrown up against intense colour, figurative forms reacting against abstract elements and decorative detail finding its counterpoint in flat planes of colour.

The insistent and repeated use of such source material would appear to point to, and add conviction to, the artist's belief in the absurdity of a consumerist society and the value it places in illusion. His work appears, on the one hand, an attempt to highlight this folly and stems from a rejection of the aspirationalist values necessary to sustain it. An element of kitsch and playfulness only partially suppress the evident dissatisfaction and frustration (even aggression?) that are offered perhaps as an antidote.

And yet? The artist is only too well aware that the continual success and renewal of the lifestyle promise that people seem ever eager to consume is such that his gesture runs the risk of proving ultimately futile and his work rendered impotent. The uncomfortable truth of which he is aware is that to allocate himself in any way a moral standpoint would in itself be a contradiction. He too is a consumer and his work in a certain context can be seen simply as yet another material commodity.

His work is confessional.