ROBERT BOYNES: MODERN TIMES
Dates & times
Thu 22 June — Sun 13 August 2017
Image: Robert Boynes, 'Red Noon' 2011 acrylic on canvas 80 x 80 cm. Private Collection Canberra
Robert Boynes’s images correspond to the classic definition of modernity given by Baudelaire, who said that modern images fused the eternal with the transitory.
The luminous expanses of white canvas breathing through grainy residues of black, red and yellow in Boynes’s paintings symbolise the constancy of time and space in relation to the mortal dust of individual existence.
Derived from contemporary photographs which evoke alienation, cosmopolitism, displacement and the speeding-up of events in both private and public spheres, the reduction of all to floating grains and scattered molecules creates a sober, essentially tragic vision of contemporary existence.
The fifteen year period covered by this survey, curated by Terence Maloon, is the remarkable culmination of a career which began in Adelaide in the 1960s, and makes a resume of of Boynes’s lifelong preoccupations.
Robert Boynes was the head of the Painting Workshop at the ANU School of Art between 1978 and 2006. The School of Art is celebrating its fortieth year in 2017.
The current exhibition  ROBERT BOYNES MODERN TIMES  23 June – 13 August 2017 was reviewed by Sasha Grishin in The Canberra Times 4 July 2017
Drill Hall Robert Boynes 2017-7
Drill Hall Robert Boynes 2017-7
Photography Rob Little
