Review by Elâ Atakan
I trust you would
Gabriella Boyd
12 December – 7 Feburary
GRIMM
Keizersgracht 241,
1016 EA, Amsterdam
Spinning Time Through a Dream Field
On Gabriella Boyd’s Work
Gabriella Boyd’s I trust you would, on view at GRIMM Gallery from 12 December to 7 February, approaches painting not as a means of representing the world, but as a space where sensory and bodily experience gathers and settles in layers. Boyd’s scenes unfold according to a dream logic: psychological configurations that feel intimate yet held in suspension, in which inner and outer states gently fold into one another. In Boyd’s own terms, the paintings are conceived as “psychological spaces,”* less concerned with describing situations than with giving form to what has no material presence: the space between two people, the atmosphere of a room. Across the exhibition, time and space drift into a shared state of indeterminacy, realized through a layered construction that recalls the way a dream is remembered rather than seen.*
Colour plays a central role in this condensation of experience. Rather than functioning descriptively, it operates as a bodily register, something felt before it is read. Boyd has often spoken about colour in direct relation to the body, recalling yellows that evoke bile, bodily fluids, or internal unease.* In I trust you would, these chromatic sensations deepen and thicken. Browns emerge across the works, not as surface tones but as layered accumulations, suggesting states closer to coagulation, soil, skin, or old blood than to fresh injury. In works such as Lumbar Scene, this brown reads as a slow, enduring condition, less an open wound than a site of care, pressure, and containment. As Boyd describes her process, colour arrives through a combination of intention and intuition, adjusted to change the emotional temperature of a painting, until it begins to feel, in her words, “like a bruise, or a platelet.”* Here, colour does not decorate space; it inhabits it, carrying the weight and density of lived, bodily time.
The title I trust you would carries this sense of duration into a more fragile register of trust and endurance. Boyd has linked the title to her experience of giving birth, a moment she describes as requiring both the greatest inner strength and a complete surrender to the situation. This paradox of solitary bodily intensity combined with reliance on others resonates throughout the exhibition, inflecting its atmospheres with a sense of suspension and vulnerability. The title itself carries a hesitation, a conditional tone that mirrors the emotional register of works such as Lumbar Scene.**
Gabriella Boyd, Lumbar Scene, 2024-2025, Oil on linen, 95 x 135 cm | 37 3/8 x 53 1/8 in, Photography: Ollie Hammick
Seeing, in Boyd’s work, is never a purely optical act but a bodily one, unfolding from within rather than directed from outside. Vision is shaped by sensation, memory, and internal imagery, collapsing the distinction between what is seen and what is felt. This understanding is informed by Boyd’s experience of her grandmother’s blindness, when images persisted through imagination rather than sight, carried internally and translated through memory.* “So much sitting and looking in close proximity, beds becoming landscapes themselves.”** According to Boyd, moving frequently during her childhood also made her aware from an early age that different spaces can change the way one feels, and that ‘‘the shapes of rooms can affect the mind on an abstract level’’.* This sensitivity extends to her painted environments, where the boundaries between body and architecture dissolve. Floor plans, rooms, and windows become emotionally charged, behaving less as neutral structures than as bodily forms. In works such as Heart (2024), Heart (v) (2024–2025) the form operates on multiple registers at once, reading both as the floor plan of the artist’s studio and as a symbolic reference to her father’s heart. Architecture and anatomy overlap, underscoring Boyd’s tendency to conceive space itself as a body. Time and space are not organised sequentially here, but layered, allowing different moments and states to coexist.
In Heart (2024), this layered structure absorbs a further charge, as the illness of Boyd’s father enters the work not as direct narrative but as shifts in pressure, energy, and tension. As Boyd has described it, the work holds “a hellish sense of alarm alongside pure love,”* registering care and vulnerability as spatial and temporal conditions rather than as depicted events. Care is not romanticized here; rather, as in doctor–patient or caregiver–dependent relationships, the thin line between tenderness and control, shaped by asymmetrical power, becomes visible. “I’ve painted flowers to depict offerings from one hand to another, as directional care and contained nature in sterile settings. The meeting point between decoration and disease. Flowers for birthdays and death or devotion. Or much more simply, flowers for looking for pure colour and still life.’’** This dynamic also extends to maternal bonds, where gestures of care appear through acts such as braiding hair. Àngels Miralda points to this critical distinction: “A caress differs from a medical intervention only in intention and intensity.”***
Gabriella Boyd, Spinner at the base, 2024-2025, Oil on linen, 230 x 180 cm | 90 1/2 x 70 7/8 in, Photography: Ollie Hammick
In Boyd’s reworking of historical images of labour, the female figures take on a distinctly obstetric sensibility. As the artist describes it: “In my painting the three figures became more midwife-like, fishing paper-thin figurines out of a river, the setting sun a cervix.”** This sensibility carries into the working figures across the exhibition, where labour informs the experience of time. Boyd’s reference to Jean François Millet in Gleaners (Millet) and Time Keeper draws on a historical imagery of female work defined by endurance and bodily rhythm, conveyed through bent postures, grounded gestures, and spinning. The spinner figure, much like in the myth of Penelope, becomes a body that suspends or holds time rather than allowing it to flow. Bodily rhythms that repeat like lunar cycles merge with the continuous, repetitive motion of spinning thread. This thread reconnects with the umbilical cord motif that has appeared in Boyd’s earlier works, forming a line of continuity that binds bodies to one another, to space, and to time. Here, the female body exists within an unending, cyclical labour, where productivity finds its meaning not in outcome but in repetition itself. Boyd articulates this fluidity explicitly: “Like with all my paintings the figure detaches from this initial source and takes on multiple characters – a midwife pulling up a baby, a florist with a hydrangea, a surgeon, a fisherwoman. Whoever she is, she somehow holds this warrior status whilst at the same time being on the point of disintegration.”**
Gabriella Boyd, Gleaners (Millet), 2024-2025, Oil on linen, 220 x 150 cm | 86 5/8 x 59 in
Gabriella Boyd, Lumbar Scene, 2024-2025, Oil on linen, 95 x 135 cm | 37 3/8 x 53 1/8 in
Photography: Ollie Hammick
Taken together, I trust you would can be read as a sustained practice of translation rather than representation. Across Boyd’s work, the body emerges as the site through which what cannot be seen or named nonetheless comes into presence, even in the throes of illness, where, as the artist has described it, “the human form cannot be contained.”**** The body here functions not only as subject but as method, a resonance that feels almost implicit in Boyd’s name itself. This psychoanalytic vein, attentive to sensation, memory, and displacement, finds an early articulation in Boyd’s engagement with Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, a moment she describes as liberating her from description and allowing her to “make solid something that had no matter.”* A similar logic underpins her dialogue with history, from the invocation of Jean-François Millet’s rural labour to the cyclical figures of care and repetition, where the past is not reconstructed but reinterpreted. What emerges is not a stable or singular truth, but a layered reading of experience, one that acknowledges how bodies, memories, and histories are continually reformed through perception.
*Gabriella Boyd, interview by Veronica Simpson, Studio International, April–August 2024
**Interview with Gabriella Boyd, via email, 19 January 2026.
***Àngels Miralda, Vigilant Space, Mile, GRIMM Gallery, November 2022, p. 114.
**** Conrad Landin, “The Unstable Bodies of Gabriella Boyd,” Apollo Magazine, 10 April 2024.
Photo credit: First installation view, I trust you would, GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL) Photography: Jonathan de Waart, 2025.