GRIMM is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by the Scottish artist Gabriella Boyd on view at our London location from 17 November to 22 December, 2023. Landing will be 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.
