GRIMM has announced the representation of London-based painter Gabriella Boyd. GRIMM will first present Boyd’s work in New York this summer as part of a group exhibition of new British painting, The Kingfisher’s Wing, curated by Tom Morton.
This will be followed by a New York solo exhibition, the artist’s first, in November 2022. Straddling a nebulous boundary between abstraction and figuration, Boyd’s paintings offer perspective into the ways
we move through the world, translating our everyday experiences and the often overlooked objects that surround us, from a cross to a hairdryer, into vibrant fields of color and expressionistic shapes. The anchor for many of her paintings’ composition is a recurring motif of two figures interacting with one another in a surreal domestic space — the interactions oscillating between seemingly tender care or
something potentially harsher or more transactional. While the figurative content of Boyd’s works are intentionally openended and non-linear, the emotional mood of the paintings is driven by the artist’s intuitive use of color, from acidic greens to warm saccharin yellows to pulsating reds.
Colors often suffuse the painting’s physical environment and figures alike, conflating architecture and anatomy and stitching figures into their surroundings, fostering a unified psychological space held within a single painting. Each painting possesses its own self-containing world of details and drama, yet one sees particular motifs — both abstract and representational — recur throughout her broader body of work, linking paintings together in a larger psychological and emotional ecosystem.
“I’m extremely proud to welcome Gabriella to the gallery program. Her paintings are powerful studies of the human condition and radiate with energy and urgency. Having carved out a unique position amongst her peers within the field of contemporary painting in just a few years, as recently evidenced by the inclusion of her paintings in Mixing It Up: Painting Today at the Hayward Gallery, her work is a great addition to the program and it is a privilege to represent her going forward.”
Jorg Grimm, Owner of GRIMM.
MORE: grimmgallery.com/gabriella-boyd/
About the artist
Gabriella Boyd (b. 1988, Glasgow) lives and works in London. She studied at Glasgow School of Art (2007-2011) and Royal Academy Schools, London (2014-2017). Current and recent solo exhibitions include Signal at Friends Indeed, San Francisco (2022); For Days at Seventeen Gallery, London (2020); Help Yourself at Blain Southern, London (2018) and group exhibitions include Mixing It Up: Painting Today at Hayward Gallery, London (2021); Fifteen Painters at Andrew Kreps, New York (2021); Reconfigured at Timothy Taylor, London (2021); Fragmented Bodies at Albertz Benda, New York (2020); The Garden at Royal Academy, London (2019); Silent Tourist at Mackintosh Lane, London (2019); The London Open at Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018); Dreamers Awake at White Cube Bermondsey, London (2017) and So Everyone is Rich Now Apparently at Supplement at 225 Canal St, New York (2017). 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 Arts Council Collection, London; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; and Saatchi Gallery, London.
