Art Basel

Press release

For her solo presentation at Art Basel Hong Kong Patricia L. Boyd has made a group of sculptures and prints that originated in transformative cuts and splits that occurred in her life in 2022: divorce, and her subsequent relocation from New York to live in London.

A series of photogravures (Untitled) depict chicken eggs lying in the artist’s lap. Eggs store within them a germ of life. Small in scale, printed by hand from etching plates, with subtle gradations and layers of ink tone on paper, these works were made in a contemplative mood. They both refer to and are the result of a reproductive act.

Also concerned with storage, four floor-based sculptures are a fragment of a larger system of works, Contents in the Storage Problem, made up of Boyd’s old cardboard moving boxes. Contents in the Storage Problem is an intensely personal archive that is preoccupied with categorizing what is still in transition and cannot cohere. It explores the ever-expanding number of personal ‘problems’ worked on by the artist while she moved from one country to another, moved her belongings between different storage units, homes, and three different studios, taking account of, and then packing, unpacking, disposing of, and re-packing personal baggage, some of which had to be divided with her ex. Now re-presented as sculpture, the boxes contain photos, drawings, and readymade objects—a private language of recurring symbolic motifs that relate to domestic life: sharp forks and knives, feathers, sexual positions, lists, liquor bottles.

In the words of author and curator Quinn Latimer, Boyd’s works are “marked by the violence of transport, of movement and memory, [...] defined by the cut—of place, time, material, relation, image, desire—and its montage of frames. As such, their interrogation is of power and its oft gendered and sexual appointments” . Boyd’s contradictory impulses towards order, and the transformative potential of disorder, form the muddy conceptual basis of these works.

Patricia L. Boyd has had critically acclaimed solo exhibitions at several prestigious venues during the past two years: Kunstverein München, Secession (Vienna), and Reena Spaulings Fine Art (New York). In 2023, there were substantial presentations of her work in group exhibitions at Eva Presenhuber (Zurich), White Columns (New York). Boyd’s work is currently on view in the 13th Taipei Biennial (2023) and will take part in the