Our Place and The Dream

RICHARD BOYD-DUNLOP (NZ)

Our Place and The Dream, 2025

600 x 600 mm

mixed media collage acrylic and paper on canvas

Both of the paintings in the Loaded exhibition are from the conversation series made up primarily of two faces,  facing inwards engaging in a conversation with each other.
The profiles are inspired by the Easter Island sculptures which are from a time gone by.
The conversations reference the past and future and the passing of time being a constant. They are discussing where we sit in the passing of time.
In the spaces between the profiles there are constellations and stars raising open questions about where we are, where we are going and how did we get here?

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Richard Boyd-Dunlop Bio 

In Richard Boyd-Dunlop’s recent practice, dense rhythms and repetitions of form invoke the connection we experience through our shared cultural referents. His work expresses how our currencies, which so often include the pop cultural material that we’ve all assimilated and loved in its various forms, the comics, cartoons and arcade games, are in some sense tribal and reach beyond mere product or commodity to become shared symbols, a lingua franca.

The starting point for Boyd-Dunlop’s work is that form of drawing that is closest to dreaming, doodling. Its freewheeling associations overrun boundaries to move simultaneously in all directions. He describes his working method as one where each painting has been generated by the narratives of the one before it; in this way the works constitute something like the screengrabs of a constantly mutating, recombinant project.

We’re reminded of the ever-replicating patterns and echoes of tribal or folk art. Boyd-Dunlop’s work is often a tapestry-like matrix of forms and fragments, an ultra-symmetrical vortex where half-remembered cartoons and idiosyncratic versions of retro icons emerge from clouds of possibility. It links the lysergic aspects of sixties Pop with the implicit psychedelia of contemporary digital culture and the kaleidoscopic structure of the internet.

This, together with Boyd-Dunlop’s interest in non-traditional materials and processes – glitter, neon strips, holography, discs - often edge the paintings towards the celebratory dazzle of religious artforms, particularly mandalas and stained glass. But they also bring to mind the densely layered online constructions of Beeple and r/Place that seem to transcend the limitations of the still image and transform as we watch, registering the dizzying overloads of contemporary culture.

Richard Boyd-Dunlop is an artist and co-director of Boyd-Dunlop Gallery. He exhibits regularly internationally and has works in many private collections