GABRIELLA BOYD

Lives and works in London (UK)

For Gabriella Boyd the act of painting is an act of translation, from the interior or verbal, into the exterior and visual. As psychological and literal spaces collide, 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.

Boyd explores the power relations between people and their environments, focusing on the charging and depletion of resources experienced in daily urban life. Merging a vibrant colour palette with select canvases, she creates a refracted appearance through often hazy, geometric interiors, evoking the doubling effect of windows or mirrors.

Gabriella Boyd studied at the Glasgow School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools, London (UK). In 2024 the artist had her first institutional solo exhibition Presser at Cample Line in Dumfriesshire, Scotland (UK), and completed the residency program with The Roberts Institute of Art in Scotland (UK) from October to November 2024.

Boyd is included in the group exhibition From Observation to Abstraction: The Body in Art at The Royal Academy of Arts on view January 23 to June 30, 2025, and she will have a solo exhibition at GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL) in the fall of 2025.

Selected solo exhibitions: Beloved Axis, Espace Niemeyer, Paris (FR), 2024; Presser, Cample Line, Dumfriesshire (UK), 2024; Landing, GRIMM, London (UK), 2023; Mile, GRIMM, New York, NY (US), 2022; Signal, Micki Meng, San Francisco, CA (US), 2020; For Days, Seventeen Gallery, London (UK), 2020; and Help Yourself, Blain Southern, London (UK), 2018.

Selected collections: AkzoNobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam (NL); Arts Council Collection, London (UK); Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH (US); de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA (US); He Art Museum, Guangdong (CN); Long Museum, Shanghai (CN); The Rachofsky Collection, Dallas, TX (US); The David and Indre Roberts Collection, London (UK); Royal Academy of Arts, London (UK); and Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (UK), among others.

Courtesy GRIMM