Max Boyla

Max Boyla (b. 1991, Edinburgh) Max Boyla is a Scottish artist based in London who recently graduated from the Royal Academy Schools. 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 by-product, 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 ‘Crying like a fire in the sun’, Workplace, London (2024, solo), ‘Slow Motion’, Des Bains, London (2023, duo); ‘Slivers in the Void’, Mamoth, London (2023, group); ‘Add More Fuel To Your Life’, Sim Smith, London (2023, solo); ‘Inside Out’, The Artist Room, London (2022, group). Max Boyla is a Scottish cross-disciplinary artist based in London. His swirling dye and bleach on satin works have an ambiguous quality which drifts between pure abstraction and natural landscape, swinging between sea and sky and formlessness. Satin is the perfect canvas, literally and metaphorically, for Max to think about environmental balance. Commonly a mix of polyester, rayon, acetate, and cotton, Satin is a composite fabric made from both natural and non-natural materials. Whilst rayon, acetate and cotton are sustainable and renewable materials, polyester is a byproduct in the process of extracting petroleum, and therefore unsustainable. Max’s work uses material to draw attention to the contrast between sustainable and unsustainable products, and how ‘green’ and ‘un-green’ living are so often woven together in our society. His sculptural works are often sardonic takes on the petroleum industry - large michelin men or ceramic iterations of the Shell logo.