Robert Boynes

Robert Boynes (born 1942) is a contemporary Australian artist.

Early life and education Boynes was born in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1942, and grew up in Peterhead, South Australia.

He studied at the South Australian School of Art in Adelaide from 1959 to 1961,

Boynes first began exhibiting professionally in 1964, when he held his first solo show at Clune Galleries in Sydney. He held solo exhibitions at Hungry Horse Art Gallery in Sydney, and Australian Galleries in Melbourne in July 1967. The latter exhibition featured his work Department Store, which signified a turning point in the artist's early career. In 1995 a retrospective of three decades of his work was held in the Nolan Gallery in Canberra.

Boynes exhibited his multi-panel installation Long Take-Slow Dissolve at Art Stage Singapore in 2015. Two of his artworks in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) and the National Gallery of Victoria were shown in the exhibition Pop to Popism at the AGNSW from 2014 to 2015. A solo show, In Plain Sight, was held at the May Space in Sydney in 2015, and in the same year, his work Auto Sex was acquired by the AGNSW.

In 2017 the ANU Drill Hall Gallery presented a retrospective of Boynes' work since 2000, titled Robert Boynes Modern Times, and curated by gallery director Terence Maloon.

After returning to Australia in 1970, Boynes held an exhibition at the Bonython Art Gallery in Sydney, between February and March of the same year. During this period, Boynes often expressed his opinions on social and political issues through his artworks. Some critiques on his works disappointed him, the fact that the intellectually sophisticated nature of his imagery and its concomitant statements about sexual and social aggression and alienation seemed to be lost, made the artist started to rethink his aesthetic position. One of his most important artworks Let's Make Things Perfectly Clear from this period was thereafter represented in 1975 and was acquired by the National Gallery of Australia.

After moving to Canberra in 1978, he was still examining the social and political issues, but started focusing more on the alienation of the individual, "individuals removed from the possibility of determining in any way their roles in an increasingly disinterested society". The political explicitness of his work during the mid-1970s was gradually humanised. He held an exhibition at the Gallery A in Sydney in 1981, in which his work showed architectural spaces (often arches, vaults or curving corridors) overlaid with a lushly applied painterly surface.

Another topic that has had a special significance for Boynes is landscape. From 1984 he had produced works through the theme of construction and destruction, but it was progressively changed to Australian bush landscape in 1995. Faith and Empire-Lowtide is a major work of the artist from the mid-1980s.

Boynes more and more depicted the urban landscape in the 1990s. His new series of works about the theme of city started around 1992. In the mid-1990s, the city for Boynes was "...the source of complex, searching and highly resonant images... Boynes' city is a city, which engages itself with those internal force, which give it character. It also engages with those external forces which imbue it with a state of potentiality, transforming it from an inert unknown mass into an actuality realized through the purposeful action of its inhabitants and through the creative action of the artist".

In 1999, the artist created many artworks depicting the urban environment. He began to utilise the uncertainty innate in the urban configuration from 2000. From 2002 onwards, he was trying different ways of presenting his world. The ongoing visualisation of the "possibilities for glimpsing something of the inherent energy, continuity and illusive mystery underlying human experience and memory" remain at the core of his art.

Recognition and awards

2017 Canberra Critics Circle exhibition of the year, Canberra ACT

2015 Artsource Artist in Residence, Fremantle Art Centre, Fremantle WA

2012 Capital Artist Patrons Organisation Fellowship Award, Canberra ACT; Visiting Artist, Westfield Belconnen Centre, Canberra ACT

2007 ARIA Living Artist Award, Gold Coast QLD

2006 Canberra Times Artist of the Year Award, Canberra ACT

2002 Residency of Chur, Switzerland

2001/2 RAAF Memorial, Anzac Parade, Canberra ACT

2001 Italo-Australia Club Canberra Art Prize, Canberra ACT

2000 Federal Court, Canberra ACT; Legislative Assembly, Canberra ACT

1999 Foyer, W Hotel, Finger Wharf, Sydney NSW

1998 Residency of Artspace, Sydney NSW

1996/7 Metre painting installation, Canberra ACT

1993/6 Project Grant, ACT Cultural Council

1983 Mattara Inv. Purchase Prize, Newcastle Region Art Gallery, Newcastle NSW

1981 Purchase Award, Gold Coast Art Prize, Gold Coast QLD

1976/7 Mural, Adelaide Festival Centre, Adelaide SA

1975 Alice Springs Art Award, Alice Springs NT

1973 Project Grant, VAB, Australia Council

1971 Barossa Festival Art Prize

1964 Ether Barringer Memorial Prize for Etching

Selected solo exhibits

Bonython Art Gallery, Adelaide (1966) Arts Council of GB, Bear Lane Gallery, Oxford, UK (1969) "Survey 7", National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Realities, Melbourne Gallery A, Sydney (1979) Phillip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane (1980) Robert Steele Gallery, Adelaide Austral Gallery, St. Louis, USA (1989) "Urban Simulations", University of Melbourne Museum of Art, Ian Potter Gallery (1995) Austral Gallery, St Louis, USA (1999) “True Fictions”, Retrospective at Canberra Museum and Gallery (2005) “Long Take – Slow Dissolve”, Art Stage Singapore, Marina Bay Sands (2015) “Silver Thread”, Beaver Galleries, Canberra (2023)