The Graves Gallery is set to reopen on Thursday 26 February with two new exhibitions celebrating homegrown creative talent and Queer expression in art. 

Following the gallery’s short closure period for redisplay, Sheffield Museums welcomes visitors with When the Day is Done: New Paintings by Ryan Mosley, presenting new work by the internationally acclaimed Sheffield-based artist. The exhibition opens alongside Revolution, Revelation, Reinforcement: Queer Legacies in Sheffield’s Art Collection, a new display bringing together historic and contemporary artworks and objects from across the city’s collections to look at how LGBTQ+ expression runs throughout the history of art.

When the Day is Done presents 20 new works by Ryan Mosley 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 city’s Graves Gallery 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.

Ryan Mosley said: “It seems fitting and I’m truly humbled to have my first solo museum show back here in Sheffield at the Graves Gallery, the place where the potential of what was possible as a young artist was ignited. I owe a lot to the Graves. Working with the team there instilled the belief in me that it was all worth it and maybe the career as a painter was possible when they offered me the opportunity to exhibit here shortly after graduating in 2004. It’s a full circle moment and making a new series of paintings feels serendipitous that they are shown here for the first time together back where it all began.”

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.  

Visitors to the gallery will also discover a new exhibition examining how LGBTQ+ art and heritage have endured across the centuries and how communities continue to express and preserve their Queer stories. Revolution, Revelation, Reinforcement: Queer Legacies in Sheffield’s Art Collection brings together artworks and objects from Sheffield’s collections to explore how Queer art speaks to the city and to our lives within it.

The exhibition sees historic and contemporary artworks and objects paired or grouped through three key conversations – Revolution, the historical legal and social constraints surrounding Queer expression; Revelation, coded messages which have been hidden or deliberately obscured; and Reinforcement, how the foundations of Queer art and its histories continue to be retained and strengthened.

 Queer Legacies in Sheffield’s Art Collection has been curated by Jon Sleigh and reflects his approach to uncovering, contextualising and celebrating Queer histories. Sleigh is an arts educator, learning facilitator and curator working with organisations across the UK.

When the Day is Done: New Paintings by Ryan Mosley and Revolution, Revelation, Reinforcement: Queer Legacies in Sheffield’s Art Collection open at the Graves Gallery on Thursday 26 February – entry to the gallery is free, suggested donation £5.

Pictured: 2. Ryan Mosley, Seasons Return, 2026 © the artist Courtesy of Josh Lilley, London, Galerie Eigen+Art, Berlin, Leipzig, Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp Rome