Graham Ashton: The Shadow of War
Art from five decades
Saturday 7 November 2026 – Sunday 24 January 2027
Rogue Artists’ Studios, 2-6 Barrass Street, Openshaw, Manchester M11 1PU
The first UK-based solo exhibition for artist Graham Ashton for over 30 years opens in Manchester this November. It follows the artist’s return to this country after several decades living and working in the USA.
Across drawings, watercolours, paintings and sculpture, the exhibition presents Ashton’s perspective on the machinery of war across five decades. His fascination with warfare began as a child, growing up during the Cold War. Foreboding images of missiles, bombs, torpedoes, guns, and more recently, drones, have populated his work since the 1970s, against a background of nuclear proliferation and numerous international conflicts including the Falklands War, Afghanistan and Ukraine.
“The imagery I was dealing with was the sort of imagery that I thought, if my life was going to end, not by accident, would be by the military… because they have a rather negative stance on life, so I began to use missiles as images – missiles and bombs – not only for the destructive qualities, but the fact that they’re very phallic.”
“There’s something very dreamlike about these things that come from the air and they’re quite nice flying through the air and then they land, they blow up and kill people.”
Graham Ashton, 1981
Included in the exhibition are some of more than 50 watercolours made over a three-year period in preparation for his large-scale wooden assemblage, ‘Family Sculpture’ (1979-80), which explored the relationships within a family, and which contained a phallic missile representing the father and a vessel to symbolise the mother. The large wooden missile in ‘Family Sculpture’ was later repurposed to become a wall-mounted sculpture, ‘Whale’, which will be shown in the exhibition.
