Martin Boyce

Martin Boyce’s sculptures, photographs and installations poetically investigate the intersections between art, architecture, design, and nature. Since the beginning of his career, he has incorporated a palette of shapes and forms that frequently recall familiar structures from the built environment – a phone booth, a chain-linked fence, a ventilation grill, to name a few – yet presents them in a way that is entirely new. Collapsing distinctions between past, present, and future, Boyce’s works seem to exist in their own autonomous world, untethered to any fixed time or place.

Winner of the Tate’s 2011 Turner Prize, Boyce was born in Hamilton, Scotland in 1967 and currently lives and works in Glasgow. He attended the Glasgow School of Art, where he received a BA in Environmental Art in 1990 and an MFA in 1997. In 1996, he also studied at California Institute for the Arts in Valencia, CA.

In 2009, Boyce represented Scotland at the 53rd Venice Biennale with a solo pavilion presentation entitled No Reflections, which traveled to Dundee Contemporary Arts in Scotland from 2009 to 2010. Other important solo presentations include the artist’s major site-specific permanent installation at Tate Britain, London (2018); Museum for Gegenwartskunst Basel, Switzerland (2015); RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island (2015); commission as part of the permanent sculpture program at the List Visual Arts Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA (2011), Martin Boyce and Ugo Rondinone: We Burn, We Shiver at SculptureCenter in New York (2008), This Place is Close and Unfolded at Westfalischer Kunstverein in Munster, Germany (2008), Out of This Sun, Into This Shadow at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, UK (2008), A Lost Cat and Alleyways, Back Gardens, Pools and Parkways at Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève in Switzerland (2007), For 1959 Capital Avenue at Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (2002), and Our Love is Like the Flowers, the Rain, the Sea and the Hours at Tramway in Glasgow (2002).

His work was also included in important group exhibitions including The TURNER, The Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, Glasgow (2019); ISelf Collection, Whitechapel, London (2017); EUROVISIONS: Contemporary art from the Goldberg Collection, National Art School, Sydney, Australia (touring to Heidie Museum, Melbourne and Canberra Regional Museum in 2018); I am not my target audience, Kunsthaus Dresden - Städtische Galerie für Gegenwartskunst, Dresden, Germany (2017); L’Esprit Du Bauhaus, L’Objet en Question, Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris (2016); GENERATION: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland, Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland (2015); Baltic Presents Turner Prize 2011 at the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, UK (2011-2012) and Alexander Calder and Contemporary Art: Form, Balance, Joy, which opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2010 and traveled to the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, CA, and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, NC through 2012.

His work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate in London, Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany, Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, PA, Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, and Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, among other institutions worldwide.