GRIMM is pleased to announce the recent acquisition of Gabriella Boyd's Night Carriage (2022) by the AkzoNobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam (NL). This is the first acquisition of the artist's work by the foundation.
Gabriella Boyd’s paintings elide the boundary between formal and representational languages, with each canvas occupied by overlapping figurative and structural motifs. Governed by a dreamlike logic, each image is at the threshold of a tangible world and a distant memory. Utilizing a distinct almost uneasy palette (which seems at once visceral and synthetic), each painting is anchored by the interrelationship between humans and their environment, hinting at a knowable narrative before evading it. As Boyd puts it, she is interrogating the “space between our physical experience of the world and our mental understanding of it. The meeting of those can be quite clumsy, or complicated, or at odds with each other. In that messy territory I seek out tenderness, humor, discomfort.”
Each work articulates a unique mise-en-scène that is reinforced by repeated visual devices, gestures or patterns that appear and reappear. Compositions are often interspersed with lineal forms - crosses, bars, structures - measuring the distance, or closeness, between their inhabitants.
"In Night Carriage (2022) the braiding of hair imitates a composition in Edgar Degas' La Coiffure (1895). Loose strands become an energetic umbilical cord. In this scene, the girl's back emits radiations of energy, challenging the sensorial supremacy of sight. Her energy reaches backward towards the tender gestures of the matriarch. Her hair pulls back belonging and reaching towards the mother like a memory of organs that retain a magnetic protection.
The two figures hurtle towards an unknown destination. The movement of the trainis depicted in the quick strokes of a night-scene that passes by within the oval frame of the carriage window. The thick matte industrial siding of the train stabilises the compartment where they sit represented by a thick flat field of applied paint. Its stillness is the perception of the bodily position of the viewer - inside the moving compartment where speed seems to be still and the world appears to slide from view flickering in the night.
The curved window of the train is unique in Boyd’s paintings which more commonly depict architecture and 90 degree boundaries. Yet here, there are only undulating surfaces like in the human body. There are no straight lines in our organism - only curves that curl and fit into each other; there is warmth, and there are frequencies. Boyd often depicts subjects in abstracted forms that focus on depicting an aura. As shadows or entangled jumbles, her characters are made of the emotional reception of attraction, engagement, repulsion, and fear that we feel among known and unknown others. Regardless of the sensation, a magnetic field emanates from the subject that warps and transcends its own fleshy boundaries towards the expanse of architecture, containment and nature. They inhabit emotional landscapes of attention that are always defined by perception."
(Excerpt from Vigilant Space, Àngels Miralda, Mile, November 2022, pp. 8-9)
Exhibition history:
Mile, GRIMM, New York, NY (US), 18 November, 2022 – 14 January, 2023
