Lost and Found - Penelope Boyd 2025

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Penelope Boyd's young heroines return to Grainger Gallery inviting the viewer to join their post-gothic worlds of danger and ambiguous intentions. Boyd's work examines the gaze, her masked characters stare with knowing looks and Mona Lisa smiles in charge of their dramatic landscapes and the animals at their feet.

Adopting the traditional painting techniques of the Old Masters and borrowing from the vast catalogue of pre-industrial Western art, Boyd's work is rich with an eerie sense of danger and uncertainty.

Masked figures occupy lush, foreboding landscapes in an imagined, dreamlike world. These girls are alone, comfortable with their seclusion and detached from any particular place or time, their identity and intentions unknown. Unlike the stilted portraits of high-born young ladies of art history, these girls inhabit a world of their own making, full of possibility and danger. They offer an escape, a fragmented narrative that invites the viewer to journey with them.

Her work is held in private collections in Australia and internationally. She was awarded the Cliftons Art Prize in 2014 and has been a finalist in various prizes including the Shirley Hannan Portrait Prize (2014), and the Yen Female Art Award (2016, 2014).