The act of painting for Gabriella Boyd is an act of translation, from the interior or verbal, into the exterior and visual. Her paintings give visual form to internal sensations, memories, narratives and spaces held in the mind. Boyd explores and collapses the distinction between interior and exterior states by bringing together representational motifs with purely symbolic structures or diagrammatic forms. In an attempt to depict embodied experience and memory, painting enables the approximation of sentiment or language, allowing invisible sources of power and energy to flourish in indefinite but sincere, candid vocabularies.
Utilizing a distinct almost uneasy palette, her paintings, some imposing in scale, others quietly intimate, explore power relations between people and their environments; the charging or depletion of resources experienced within daily life spent in an urban city system. Pale greens, whites and yellows infuse select canvases with the luminous quality of artificial halogen bulbs, of street lamps and train carriages, refracted through hazy, geometric interiors that imply a doubling effect of windows or mirrors.
“Painting from an urban centre - Boyd focuses on topics of care and attention in a world that increasingly seems devoid of connection. Although we cohabit the city with millions of strangers and share intimate crowded spaces with them daily on the tube, it can never have the same effect of sharing a bedroom with a significant other. A caress differs from a medical swipe only in intention and intensity. It is these magnified relations that cannot be separated from flesh, body, mind, and space that enter an intermingled world of texture, colour, and hypnotic abstraction. Within the visual realm of Boyd’s architectural and pictorial vocabulary are the primordial emotions of human attention, of the necessity of sharing with others and the bonds that make us human.”
(Excerpt from Vigilant Space, Àngels Miralda, Mile, November 2022, p. 114)
Gabriella Boyd (b. 1988, Glasgow, UK) lives and works in London (UK). She studied at Glasgow School of Art (2007-2011) and Royal Academy Schools, London (2014-2017). She was shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize in 2016, and was commissioned by the Folio Society to illustrate a new edition of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams in 2015. Boyd is currently featured in group exhibition From Observation to Abstraction: The Body in Art at The Royal Academy of Arts, London (UK) on view until October 9, 2025 and will present a solo exhibition of new works at GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL) opening on December 12, 2025 – February 7, 2026.
Her work is held in the permanent collection of AkzoNobel Art Foundation (NL); Arts Council Collection (UK); Columbus Museum of Art (US); The David and Indrė Roberts Collection (UK); De Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (US); He Art Museum (CN); Long Museum (CN); The Rachofsky Collection (US); Royal Academy of Arts Collection (UK) and Walker Art Gallery Collection (UK).
