PARIS.- Marian Goodman Gallery Paris is presenting Dream Time, Daniel Boyd's first solo exhibition in France, which includes a series of new paintings and an intervention in dialogue with the gallery's architecture. With his unique pictorial language, Daniel Boyd seeks to de-locate our visual perception from a single entry to one of multiplicity by directing our gaze toward narratives obscured by empire and oppressive cultural framework. Taking as his subject landscapes, historical representations and portraits linked to his own personal history, heretofore invisible, as well as iconic figures rarely depicted in the visual arts, Daniel Boyd continues to transmit and transpose his cultural and artistic traditions while expanding our collective imagination.
The title of the exhibition responds to “dreamtime,” the term given by early European anthropologists to define what they understood to be the mythology behind the natural order of things for most Australian Aboriginal groups, proposing a reductive vision of their cultures, which are both highly diverse and interconnected by complex narrative networks. Boyd, who is of plural origins (descended from indigenous Australians and South Sea islanders), splits the term dreamtime into binary opposites (Dream Time), allowing the uncontrollable nature of a dream to be freed from the European linear and controlled perception of time. By way of poiesis, those who have been uprooted and culturally assimilated have arrived ata new constellation of narratives liberated from time and space, selecting stories addressed to new generations. Through each new series of paintings Boyd seeks to redress and overturn existing hierarchies of aesthetic forms and representations.
In Untitled (TAOBIAM) (2024), for example, we recognize the almost imperceptible silhouette of the Apollo of Belvedere, one of the most famous sculptures of antiquity, described by the art historian Winckelmann as “the most excellent thing that nature, art and the mind combined to produce”. The image of the Greek god of harmony, beauty and light rubs shoulders with the portrait of the artist's grandmother in Untitled (NILYMY) (2023) and the natural landscape near the birthplace of one of her grandmothers in Untitled (WMHTA) (2024). Modern and contemporary figures from a wide variety of backgrounds are part of Daniel Boyd's Dream Time, such as the fictional Freddy Krueger, a horror movie icon known for murdering teenagers in their dreams in Untitled (NSD) (2024); and basketball player Magic Johnson, charismatic leader of the American Dream Team who made history by winning the gold medal at the 1992 Olympic Games in Untitled (NIIDT) (2024). In Untitled (LIYSLOAGPCD) (2024), the artist uses a photographic portrait of André Breton, leader of Surrealism, who placed the dream at the center of the movement's research, while continuing Modernism's cultural appropriation of non-European art forms.
Boyd cites the idea of the “right to opacity” developed by Edouard Glissant as a conceptual inspiration that guides his formal practice. According to Glissant, the Martinique-born French writer, this concept is defined as the right of all people to preserve their psycho-cultural specificities, in opposition to the ideal of transparency promoted by the West, which throughout history has trivialized and sometimes denied the differences between peoples. Boyd's pointillist technique, unrelated to the dot painting of the indigenous artists of Australia's central desert region, aims to translate this thinking. Transparent convex dots randomly populate the surface of the canvases to interact with black paint that encircles the dots, setting the entire surface of the painting in motion. These dots, described by the artist as “lenses through which we can access distinct points of knowledge, experience or perspective”, allow each visitor to perceive the images differently, depending on their distance or position. The profusion of points, on the other hand, represents our collective vision. Finally, the well-guarded secrets behind the paintings’ process give them a magical dimension, shrouding them in mystery, as a metaphor for the right to opacity.
Continuing this interplay of perception, the intervention on the gallery's first floor reveals a kind of twilight, and as in his 2023 installation in the atrium of Berlin's Gropius Bau, Boyd transforms the gallery's brightest space into a near-dark room after applying perforated black vinyl to the entire zenithal skylight and windows. The effect of furtive movement perceived in the paintings is then activated in the space as outside light and sunlight make their way through the vinyl, drawing a kind of starry sky in negative on the floor, not far from the presence of the moon in the exhibition in Untitled (YBBNTOE).
Daniel Boyd was born in 1982 in Gimuy/Cairns, Queensland, north-east Australia. He lives and works in Sydney. He studied art at the School of Art & Design at the Australian National University in Canberra. His origins lie in several Australian First Nations and South Sea Islander groups such as Gudjal, Ghungalu, Wangerriburra, Wakka Wakka, Kuku Yalanji, Bundjalung, Yuggera and ni-Vanuatu.
Boyd has been exhibiting since 2005. Recent solo exhibitions include Doan, at Pacific Place in Hong Kong, in collaboration with Art Basel Hong Kong (2024), Dreamland, at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York (2024) and RAINBOW SERPENT (VERSION), a joint project with the Gropius Bau in Berlin and the IMA, Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane (2023). His work was also the subject of a retrospective in 2022 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Australia. Boyd has taken part in numerous international exhibitions, including the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), curated by Okwui Enwezor, and the 20th Biennale of Sydney (2016). In 2017, he took part in Mondialité, at the invitation of curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Asad Raza at the Boghossian Foundation in Brussels. He collaborated with Adjaye Associates on the creation of the George Street Plaza and Community Building in public space in Sydney (2022). In 2020 the Australian Institute of Architects awarded the memorial he designed, For Our Country (2019), the Canberra Medallion, the highest award for architecture in the Australian Capital Territory, it also won the national award for Small Project Architecture, the Nicholas Murcutt Award.
Marian Goodman Gallery champions the work of artists who stand among the most influential of our time and represents over five generations of diverse thought and practice. The Gallery’s exhibition program, characterized by its caliber and rigor, provides international platforms for its artists to showcase their work, foster vital dialogues with new audiences, and advance their practices within nonprofit and institutional realms. Established in New York City in 1977, Marian Goodman Gallery gained prominence early in its trajectory for introducing the work of seminal European artists to American audiences. Today, through its exhibition spaces in New York, Los Angeles, and Paris, the Gallery maintains its global focus, representing over 50 artists working in the U.S. and internationally.
