Robert Boynes

Robert Boynes’s recent paintings are continuous with the formal and conceptual issues that he has pursued in his art since the early 1960s. His images have consistently focused on the conditions of capitalism and the systems that order political, economic and cultural power. Throughout his career, his images have been critical of social inequality and urban chaos, and the degeneration of ecologies. They have lamented the alienation of the individual from community, and have questioned how we negotiate concepts of private and public space. The politics that infuse Boynes’s work across his career are complex and uncompromising, though not always as overt as some of his more declarative images from the 1960s and 1970s that addressed consumer culture and marketing ethics, gender politics and feminist issues, American imperialism – often incorporating text as a co-option of advertising strategies – and, closer to home, homelessness.

Jason Smith
Curator, Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Victoria
Excerpt from exhibition catalogue

Robert Boynes
Australia 1942
Tube, 2003
synthetic polymer paint on canvas
120.0 x 320.0 cm
Courtesy of the artist and William Mora Galleries, Melbourne and Brenda May Gallery, Sydney