De La Warr Pavilion is pleased to present the first institutional solo exhibition of London-based artist Mike Silva.

Silva (b. 1970, Sandviken, Sweden) paints portraits, interiors, still lifes, and landscapes drawn from an ongoing personal archive of photographic material. This archive, much of which is rooted in the London of the 1990s and early 2000s, is presented as an evolving constellation on the artist’s studio walls, with printed photographs tacked, taped, grid-lined, and painted. These images serve as a flexible material that Silva draws from instinctively, gradually shifting subjects from photographic to painted space.

Through his ability to capture subtle shifts of light and shadow within moments quietly and intimately observed, Silva moves beyond the photorealist genre through his gestural application of paint on canvas. The generous use of white in his process offers a hazy quality to many of the works, connecting to the fleeting moments that they depict and the transient nature of recollection. In each composition, we sense a tension between the instantaneous nature of a photo captured in the past and the slow movement of bringing that image into the present through painting. Encountering Silva’s works is thus a physical and focusing experience. Although we may recognise certain signals to a past moment in each composition, his ability to render images on the canvas recrystallises memory in the present moment of our looking, creating a timelessness that resonates throughout his oeuvre.

The exhibition at DLWP will bring together new and recent paintings including portraits, interiors and landscapes. These include acquaintances, friends and lovers of past and present, as well as the interior spaces that these subjects spend or spent time in. Responding to the ambient quality of DLWP’s Ground floor gallery, the exhibition will include several works where light serves as a compositional protagonist, together with a new landscape painting showing the dappling of light through a parkland enclosure – a former cruising ground in North London. Together, the selection of works at DLWP conjures people and spaces of time passed through peripheral moments activated throughout the gallery.

A new, fully-illustrated publication will accompany the exhibition, featuring an extended interview between Silva and Joseph Constable, Head of Exhibitions at DLWP, and a text by artist, editor and writer, Sean Burns. Mike Silva’s exhibition is organised by De La Warr Pavilion, in collaboration with Mead gallery, Warwick Arts Centre where it will tour in spring 2025.