DANIEL BOYD

One of Australia’s most highly regarded artists and the 2014 winner of the prestigious Bulgari ArtPrize, Daniel Boyd has been showing in Australia and internationally since 2005. He has participatedin the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), as curated by Okwui Enwezor, and the 20th Biennale of Sydney(2016), and was the subject of a 2022 retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Hisexhibition RAINBOW SERPENT (VERSION), a joint project with Gropius Bau, Berlin and IMA,Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane recently concluded on 16 December 2023.

With his complex and divergent works spanning an array of historical references from landscape andWestern-style portraiture to the traditions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, Boyd seeksto negotiate the identity of art, history and cultural survival through his investigations of oppressedand colonial culture. His questioning of what is defined as history blends seamlessly into theconfluence of his work, where he brings to the forefront the often overlooked and discarded history ofhis Aboriginal ancestors. “We have the oldest continuous culture on earth and it’s important tocelebrate that,” said Boyd.

In the paintings on view, Boyd punctuates the canvas with dots or ‘lenses’ with a mixture of blackpaint and archival glue. Unlike Aboriginal dot painting, which was traditionally created with sand, oron the body, as a form of storytelling, his mark-making is reflective of the Gestalt theory of perception.The mind interprets an organised whole through the multitude of lenses, a form of gestalt, as a meansto perceive the work; additionally, the profusion of dots represents the collective viewpoint. These actsof intervention through a ‘lens’ that both inscribes and erases its subject, are informed as well by theallegory of Plato’s Cave (the metaphorical realm between reality and interpretation), and the search fordark matter, where the unseen and the in-between carry meaning.

Within the subject matter of his work, Boyd brings attention to, and reveals his rejection of, Westerntraditions as canon and conveys his desire to revise the way history is taught. By imprinting dots thatultimately obfuscate the illustrated subject, Boyd creates a connection to “blackness, porosity andhistory,” as noted by Asad Raza.

Boyd’s explorations of Western civilisation focus on cultural objects, the longing for landscape, andportraits that are both historic and personal. Revisiting and revising the perspective of who is notable-he questions the motivations and desires to elevate specific aesthetic forms, challenging what isdefined as archetypal, and examining received hierarchies on beauty and race. In questioning socialstructures, he addresses who is given representation in the arts. In his paintings, he depicts ApolloBelvedere, a Greek god of harmony, beauty, and perfection, and Elizabeth Taylor, who played theEgyptian queen Cleopatra in the 1963 film of the same name.

First Nation culture is imbued in works that carry both biographical and historical significance forBoyd; in Untitled (GB17), he depicts his maternal grandmother at a mission wedding, which is in part

a loving tribute as well as a reminder of the many ways that colonialists controlled indigenousAustralians. Similarly, paintings of a sunset near his grandmother’s home, Untitled(TALTIHHASFATS); or one showing Aboriginal men obscured in the rainforest, Untitled(IFITFOMADFSP), as well as the silhouette of a younger Aboriginal person Untitled (HBOAIAZ),offer evidence of the dream of a homeland. A boomerang sits above a horizon line, in Untitled(AIAFNSCAI), conveying cultural appropriation of the object; Untitled (IKTWMICAHFT) features aceremonial figure collected by Matisse, underscoring the assimilation of indigenous history inmodernism’s past.

The dot paintings have a textured quality about them, a three-dimensional feel which changes withhow and where it is presented with the use of angle and light. The surface of the painting almost feelsas if it can be activated. The employing of optical and translucent convex lenses within his workconversely exposes what the viewer cannot see, serving as a reflection of history as dispersed extracts,distorted and revised. Boyd says, “I wanted them to be alive. I wanted a kind of movement in them,and a continuum through activation, so that audience activates them. It gives them the opportunity togrow and gather association so it’s not on the surface, it’s a convex. The light catches as you movecoming in front of it.”

Daniel Boyd was born in 1982 in Cairns. Now a resident of Sydney, Boyd studied art at the AustralianNational University’s School of Art & Design in Canberra. His heritage spans several tribes includingKudjala, Ghungalu, Wangerriburra, Wakka Wakka, Gubbi Gubbi, Kuku Yalanji, Bundjalung, Yuggeraand ni-Vanuatu.

Past solo exhibitions include Daniel Boyd: Treasure Island, his 2022 exhibition at the Art Gallery ofNSW, Roslyn Oxley Gallery and his first at Mori Gallery; he participated at Melbourne Arts Festival in2010. Okwui Enwezor selected Boyd to take part in the Venice Biennale in 2015; in the same year, hewas the winner of the inaugural Young Artist Award, as given by the Melbourne Art FoundationAwards for the Visual Arts. Boyd joined seven of his fellow art practitioners in a new artist-in-residencetrial on Cockatoo Island, Sydney, in 2009. In 2008, the Queensland Art Gallery’s Gallery of ModernArt included his work in Contemporary Australia: Optimism.