Gabriella Boyd

Gabriella Boyd, born in Glasgow in 1988, studied at Glasgow School of Art (2007-2011) and then at Royal Academy Schools, London (2014-17). Her paintings elide the boundary between formal and representational language; each canvas comprising overlapping figurative and structural motifs.  

Seemingly governed by a dreamlike logic, Boyd’s images are described in a distinct almost uneasy palette of greens, yellows, warm pinks and reds, and appear at the threshold of a tangible world and a distant memory. 

Boyd has said that her work interrogates the “space between our physical experience of the world and our mental understanding of it. The meeting of those can be quite clumsy, or complicated, or at odds with each other. In that messy territory I seek out tenderness, humour and discomfort.”

In 2016 Boyd was shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize, and in the previous year she was commissioned by the Folio Society to illustrate a new edition of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. The artist’s work is held in the permanent collection of the Arts Council Collection, London (UK); Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH (US); de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA (US); He Art Museum, Foshan (CN); Long Museum, Shanghai (CN); The Roberts Institute of Art, London (UK); Royal Academy of Arts, London (UK) and Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (UK).

Gabriella Boyd lives and works in London and is represented by Grimm.