Daniel Boyd

Daniel Boyd’s practice is widely recognized for its engagement with the pluralities of time, space, culture, and personal experience. At once intimate, historical, and metaphysical in its scope, the Sydney-based artist’s paintings, video works, and installations mine the complexity of perspectives through which we—individually and collectively—assemble cultural and personal memory.

While many of the discussions surrounding Boyd’s work have touched on his particular iteration of post-colonialist history painting via the lens of his First Nations Australian and Ni-Vanuatuan heritage, there is far more to his distinctive pointillist technique than a simple rumination on cultural erasure. The dark matter that enshrouds the flashes of perceptual detail in Boyd’s works is as much a central philosophical and conceptual pillar of his practice as the astronomical fields, landscapes, portraits, reflections, and refractions of light that lie amidst and beneath it. Quietly and poetically, he traverses the strands of our psychohistorical ellipses.

Boyd’s practice has lead him to participate in major biennales and exhibitions including All the World’s Futures, 56th Venice Biennale, Venice (2015), curated by Okwui Enwezor; Mondialité (2017) curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Asad Raza at the Boghossian Foundation, Villa Empain, Brussels (2017); A Time for Dreams, Moscow International Biennale for Young Arts, Moscow, curated by David Elliot (2014); The 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (2012); Kochi-Muziris Biennale: Whorled Explorations, Kochi, India (2014), curated by Jitish Kallat; and Culture Warriors: National Indigenous Art Triennial, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2007), curated by Brenda L Croft. He has undertaken major architectural commissions in collaboration with Adjaye Associates (London, New York, and Accra) and Edition Office (Melbourne).