please click here to view ABC Broadcast 11 November 2011
David Boyd OAM (1924 - 2011)
It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of David Boyd OAM, one of Australia’s greatest artists and a dear friend of Eva Breuer Art Dealer.
David died on Thursday 10th November 2011 surrounded by three generations of his family in Sydney after a short illness. He was eighty-seven years old.
David Boyd was well known as an outstanding painter and ceramicist. His art stemmed from a long family tradition of artistic talent. Acclaimed as an exceptional potter in the fifties and sixties, his career as a celebrated painter was highlighted by many major works, including the symbolic series The Explorers and The Tasmanians. Following on from these groundbreaking and confronting series, David continued to produce series that explored themes of injustice and man's inhumanity to man. It was his intention to illuminate the darker areas of the human condition. Picturing innocence and evil, destruction and creation, his works convey mythical and universal themes.
Throughout his career David won multiple and significant international recognition, including the Italian Government Art Scholarship, and he was the Chairman of the Contemporary Art Society of Australia. He was invited by the Commonwealth Institute of Art, London, to hold a retrospective of paintings at their art gallery in 1969. David Boyd is represented in the Australian National Gallery, Canberra; all state and many regional galleries; the Mertz Collection, USA; the Power Collection, Sydney; and many major international galleries and private collections in Australia and overseas.
In April 2001, Eva Breuer Art Dealer held an exhibition of his last series Reconciliation. The exhibition was described as both poetic and exciting, from an artist of passion, imagination and ever-growing humanity (Nadine Amadio, author).
In June 2008, David was awarded an OAM for his services to art as a painter and innovator of design and techniques in pottery and ceramic sculpture.
In August 2010, David was honoured for his contribution to Australian arts and culture at a special luncheon hosted by the Governor of New South Wales, Marie Bashir AC, CVO at Government House. At this event, the Governor announced a major David Boyd exhibition to be held in August 2012 at the National Trust S. H. Ervin Gallery in collaboration with Eva Breuer Art Dealer.
David Boyd was not only a dedicated and celebrated artist but urbane, articulate and a true gentleman. David was devoted to his wife Hermia who died in 2000, a gifted artist in her own right. David adored his daughters, Amanda, who died in 1998, Lucinda and Cassandra and his grandchildren Cressida, Jesamine, Irian, Tom and Will and great grandchildren Georgia, Noah, Chloe and Cy all of whom brought him much joy and happiness.
His passing is a major loss to the art world and to the country.
David Boyd had a unique insight and an enormous heart. He will be greatly missed.