ROGER BOYCE – Muse – 27 June-21 July 2017

An exhibition of 40 tondos from the ‘Muse’ series
and four paintings from the ‘Girl with Prosthesis’ series.

 

“They seem like nice enough people, these ladies. For the most part, warm maternal types of a certain age. Definitely, defiantly suburban – divorcees and widows. Perhaps they’re trying just a little too hard, in expression and pose, in these selfies and quasi-professional shots: the out-of-date faux glamour of their hair, makeup and ‘80s designer knockoff clothes. The female subjects of Roger Boyce’s Muse have been sourced for the bittersweet milieu of dating website profiles. It’s a brave step these women take; to put one’s self out there online looking for love… Boyce is gentle with these women, lifting them from a context of brave optimism and last chances, and resettling them in a fine art context, picking and choosing romantic painterly stereotypical backgrounds to flatter them.”

Dr Andrew Paul Wood
An excerpt from ‘Splendid in their Ashes’, 2014, ‘Muse – Roger Boyce’ catalogue

 

  

Roger Boyce has enjoyed one person exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Paris, Melbourne, Sydney, Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland and has been included in exhibitions at the Sao Paulo Bienal, Brazil, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, PS 1, The Clocktower, New York, Creative Time, Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage, New York, FIAC-Decouvert at the Grand Palais, Paris, The Drawing Centre, New York, and Otis Parsons Art Institute Los Angeles.

Boyce’s work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, the deYoung Museum, San Francisco, the Dallas Museum of Art, Christchurch Art Gallery, the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, and the University Art Museum, University of California at Berkeley.

Awards include a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, a Mid-Atlantic Foundation, National Endowment to the Arts Grant, a Harnish Foundation Fellowship, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Nomination.He has taught studio and seminar courses at Smith College, Princeton University, and Carnegie Mellon University.

He lectured in Painting at The School of Fine Arts, The University of Canterbury, New Zealand until 2020. Boyce has organised and curated exhibitions in New York, New England, Australia and New Zealand. Boyce has also contributed critical writing to Art in America, Sculpture, Art New Zealand, Artnet and White Fungus among other publications. In talking about his practice Boyce states, “I employ caricature, parody, irreverence, eros, observation & embroidered transcription to buffer the mortal inevitabilities we all inevitably suffer.”