GRIMM is pleased to announce the recent acquisition of Gabriella Boyd's Dam (2022) by the Long Museum, Shanghai (CN). This is the first acquisition of the artist's work by the museum.
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 the painting Dam, a figure dissolves in pyramidal forms into its landscape, merging into the base of a bridge that spans the width of the canvas, a metaphor for many of the exhibition’s wider themes; of journeying, the passage of time and ultimately the connection between two points or two people celebrate the act of creating in its entirety.
"The social energy-fields that Boyd’s paintings represent come alive through the making-visible of invisible ligaments in vivid tints. Like the greens that vibrate off of eachother, the choice of palette uses colour theory to create force fields of vision on the surface of the canvas. Each hue provides planes of attention or diversion hovering around a subject like an aura – a word deriving from the Greek root meaning “air” or “breeze” – and likewise, it cannot be seen but felt like a whip of wind.
Force fields are created between the colours, objects, and also between figures of Boyd’s images with the willing focus of attention. Bodies combine with umbilical cords made visible. Lines of energy fall away from tired eyes or concentrated mental energy. The human is augmented into a world in which psychic energies materialise as streaks in space. The figurative gives way to an expanded sensibility that verges towards abstraction as sensorial space."
- (Excerpt from Vigilant Space, Àngels Miralda, Mile, November 2022, p. 102)
Exhibition history:
Mile, GRIMM, New York, NY (US), 18 November, 2022 – 14 January, 2023
