Robert Boynes


Robert Boynes is a contemporary Australian artist working primarily in painting, but has also produced prints, films and sculptures.

Early Life and Career

Boynes grew up in Peterhead in Adelaide’s northwest, South Australia. He studied at the South Australian School of Art in Adelaide from 1959 to 1961 where he returned to undertake further studies in Printmaking from 1962 to 1964. Boynes thereafter lectured at the Wattle Park Teachers’ College and South Australian School of Art between 1964 and 1967.
In 1967 Boynes left Australia for England where he worked as a lecturer at the Maidstone College of Art, Kent and Basingstoke Tech College from 1968 to 1969. He returned to Australia in 1970 and then mainly lectured in painting and printmaking at Wattle Park Teachers’ College and Murray Park CAE between 1970 and 1977. During this period, he also lectured in painting at the South Australian School of Art in 1972 and finished a Master of Fine Arts in Film at Flinders University, Adelaide, from 1974 to 1975.

Boynes left Adelaide and relocated to Canberra in 1978, where he took up the position as senior lecturer and head of painting at the Canberra School of Art. He held the position until his retirement in 2006.

Artistic Practice

Boynes first began exhibiting professionally in 1964, when he held his first solo show at Clune Galleries in Sydney. Before leaving Australia Boynes 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. Although this period was marked by a burgeoning awareness in Australia's role as part of a larger Western culture, primarily associated with the glamorous attractions of the prosperous United States, Boynes had an explicit preference for England and European culture. Therefore, he left for England in late 1967. He was inspired by the allure and interrogation of consumerism of the neo-pop era, and was influenced by artists such as Richard Hamilton, R.B. Kitaj and James Rosenquist. Boynes’ series Leisure Machinery was exhibited at the Bear Lane Gallery in Oxford, England, in 1969.
Boynes returned to Australia in 1970, holding 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. Also, 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.
Boynes moved to Canberra in 1978. At that time, he still examined the social and political issues but focused 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 humanized. He held an exhibition at the Gallery A in Sydney in 1981; the architectural spaces which were overlaid with a lushly applied painterly surface were obviously defined by this exhibition.
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 enigmatic and enthralling artworks, which continuously depict the urban environment. He began to utilize the uncertainty innate in the urban configuration from 2000. From 2002 onwards, he was trying different ways of presenting his world. The ongoing visualization 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.
In recent years, Boynes exhibited his multi-panel installation Long Take-Slow Dissolve at Art Stage Singapore in 2015, where he was represented by May Space, Sydney. There were also two artworks in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Gallery of Victoria that were shown in the exhibition Pop to Popism at the AGNSW from 2014 to 2015. A solo show of the artist 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 was curated by gallery director Terence Maloon.
Robert Boynes is currently respresented by May Space, Sydney, and Beaver Galleries, Canberra.

Awards/Commissions/Residencies – Selected

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