Artist: Gabriella Boyd

GRIMM presents a solo exhibition of new works by the Scottish artist Gabriella Boyd on view at the London location. Landing is Boyd’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, following her exhibition Mile in 2022 at GRIMM, New York, NY (US).

This exhibition precedes the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition at Cample Line in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, opening Spring 2024.

On view in Landing are a group of paintings that give visual form to internal sensations, memories, narratives and spaces held in the mind. The act of painting for Boyd 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.

In these canvases, some imposing in scale, others quietly intimate, Boyd explores 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 streetlamps and train carriages, refracted through hazy, geometric interiors that imply a doubling effect of windows or mirrors.

Throughout the exhibition, each painting acts as a container of both architectural and narrative space whose boundaries inevitably overlap with one another, expressing multiple thoughts or ideas as experienced in the mind, developing or mutating over time.

The title, Landing, whilst relaying a literal sense of journeying within a domestic setting or a landscape more broadly, also intimates the gap between experience and understanding, the lapse between perceiving an event and it landing as it sinks in. Holding time within these the physical and metaphorical containers, Boyd brings us glimpses of figuration hinting at wider interpersonal dynamics and physical ties, emoting a feeling of care or desire and longing.

Gabriella Boyd (b. 1988, Glasgow, UK) lives and works in London (UK). She studied at Glasgow School of Art and Royal Academy Schools, London (UK). Boyd 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.

Her work is held in the permanent collection of the 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 Roberts Institute of Art, London (UK); Royal Academy of Arts, London (UK) and Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (UK).

Recent solo exhibitions include Mile at GRIMM, New York, NY (US); Signal at Friends Indeed, San Francisco, CA (US); For Days at Seventeen Gallery, London (UK); and Help Yourself at Blain Southern, London (UK).

Recent group exhibitions include The Descendants at K11 Musea, Hong Kong (HK); PRESENT ’23 at Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH (US); Cursed Union at Micki Meng, San Francisco, CA (US); The Kingfisher's Wing, curated by Tom Morton, GRIMM, New York, NY (US); Mixing It Up: Painting Today at Hayward Gallery, London (UK); Fifteen Painters at Andrew Kreps, New York, NY (US); Reconfigured at Timothy Taylor, London (UK); Fragmented Bodies at Albertz Benda, New York, NY (US); The Garden at Royal Academy, London (UK); Silent Tourist at Mackintosh Lane, London (UK); The London Open at Whitechapel Gallery, London (UK) and Dreamers Awake at White Cube Bermondsey, London (UK).