Last light, 2025
Max Boyla (b. 1991, Edinburgh) is a Scottish artist based in London who graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2023.
Holding to a tradition that sees painting as an illusion, Boyla’s work can exist in a perpetual limbo: a place where the limited and real world mingles with the eternal and fictional.
His satin surfaces, a synthetic material derived as a petroleum byproduct, create tension, offering a lustre towards abstract cosmologies. Shorn of all sense of time and place, fantasies of the infinite collide with a questioning of a contemporary state of disillusionment.
Highlights of recent exhibitions include 'An Uncommon Thread', Hauser & Wirth, Somerset (2025, group); 'Art For Your Oceans', Sotheby’s, London (2025, group); ‘New Contemporaries’ ICA, London (2025, group); 'Double Take', LVH, London (2024, group); 'Crying like a fire in the sun', Workplace, London (2024, solo); 'Add More Fuel To Your Life', Sim Smith, London (2023, solo); 'The Sound of Silence', The Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington Gardens, London (2021, Site-specific neon installation).
Holding to a tradition that sees painting as an illusion, Boyla’s work can exist in a perpetual limbo: a place where the limited and real world mingles with the eternal and fictional.
His satin surfaces, a synthetic material derived as a petroleum byproduct, create tension, offering a lustre towards abstract cosmologies. Shorn of all sense of time and place, fantasies of the infinite collide with a questioning of a contemporary state of disillusionment.
Highlights of recent exhibitions include 'An Uncommon Thread', Hauser & Wirth, Somerset (2025, group); 'Art For Your Oceans', Sotheby’s, London (2025, group); ‘New Contemporaries’ ICA, London (2025, group); 'Double Take', LVH, London (2024, group); 'Crying like a fire in the sun', Workplace, London (2024, solo); 'Add More Fuel To Your Life', Sim Smith, London (2023, solo); 'The Sound of Silence', The Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington Gardens, London (2021, Site-specific neon installation).