Daniel Boyd

OSCAAR MOULIGNE is pleased to announce an exhibition by Australian artist Daniel Boyd, entitled Euro Step, on view from September 6 until November 1, 2025. This marks the artist’s first solo presentation in Japan, featuring a suite of new works that continues his exploration of the multiplicity of memories, histories, and cultural identities over time. 

Boyd’s practice, which spans painting, installation, and spatial interventions, seeks to challenge conceived notions—typically in relation to empirical ideologies and systems of power—as well as dominant legacies of colonialism and Eurocentric narratives. By reimagining historical archives, portraits, and landscapes, also intricately linked to his personal history and identity as a descendent of Indigenous Australians and South Sea islanders, Boyd presents a manifestation of the gaps and silences of imperial accounts while foregrounding Indigenous perspectives and lived experience. 

In his paintings, Boyd creates a distinctive visual language by employing a pointillist technique that he has developed since around 2009. This process involves applying pigment or charcoal and translucent dots of archival glue to the canvas with layers or black paint or dark tones that obscure and transform his subjects. Through a process of inscription and erasure, and by partially veiling imagery with the dispersed, convex dots—which he describes as “lenses through which we can access distinct points of knowledge, experience, or perspective”— Boyd destabilizes the clarity of the image, compelling viewers to assemble the fragmented image into a coherent whole. This act of visual completion exemplifies ideas of Gestalt theories that inform the artist’s work, operating not only at the level of visual perception whereby the mind fills spaces in incomplete forms, but also as a metaphor for epistemological gaps in Australia’s colonial past. Similarly, his oscillation between foreground and background reflects the figure-ground principle (a key concept from Gestalt psychology that describes how humans visually organize information) forcing viewers to negotiate between what is obscured and what is revealed. In this way, Boyd’s works present history not as a fixed image but as a dynamic, layered, and continually shifting perceptual experience.

Several recurring motifs and metaphors weave throughout Boyd’s artistic oeuvre. In the paintings featured in the exhibition, mythical subjects, such as the classical image of the Ancient Greek god Poseidon; historical figures, like Julius Caesar; and familial and cultural symbols, such as the boomerang, are intertwined with explorations of perception, exemplified in Untitled (OWOTOYGTSAC), which depicts the Necker Cube- a classic optical illusion and well-known example in Gestalt psychology. References to water, as in the comic image of a drowning man in Untitled (DWMISOAM), and celestial bodies, such as the moon in Untitled (IGEWTCSDSOMS), are also juxtaposed with the depiction of a sports figure known for popularizing the Euro step, an offensive basketball move from which the exhibition title is derived. Boyd further conveys the dual presence of light and shadow through symbolic imagery, contrasting bright hopes and dreams with darker themes of nightmares and destructive realities.

By layering past and present narratives, Boyd constructs spaces of multiplicity and in-betweenness, where cultural memory, resilience, and resistance surface against the enduring weight of colonization. His work summons a poetic meditation on the interplay between the visible and the obscured, probing how history is remembered, interpreted, and retold in contemporary contexts. In doing so, it evokes a profound reflection on humanity and our place in the universe.

About the artist

Daniel Boyd (b. 1982, Cairns, lives and works in Sydney) is one of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists, acclaimed for his critical and transformative approach to history and representation. He studied art at the School of Art & Design at the Australian National University in Canberra and has been exhibiting internationally since 2005. His origins lie in several Australian First Nations and South Sea Islander groups such as Gudjal, Ghungalu, Wangerriburra, Wakka Wakka, Kuku Yalanji, Bundjalung, Yuggera and ni-Vanuatu. 

Recent solo exhibitions include Dream Time, Marian Goodman, Paris (2024), Dreamland, Marian Goodman, New York (2024), RAINBOW SERPENT (VERSION), Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin and Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2023); and a major retrospective exhibition Treasure Island, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney (2022). Recent biennales and group exhibitions include to carry, Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates (2025); Bonna, Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka, Bangladesh (2023); Kathmandu Triennale 2077, Kathmandu, Nepal, curated by Cosmin Costinas (2022); UN/LEARNING AUSTRALIA, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul (2021-22); Divided Worlds, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia (2018); Mondialité, Boghossian Foundation, Villa Empain, Brussels, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist & Asad Raza (2017); The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed, 20th Biennale of Sydney, curated by Stephanie Rosenthal (2016) and All the World’s Futures, the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), curated by Okwui Enwezor. Boyd was the recipient of the prestigious Bulgari Art Award (2014). His work is held in major collections worldwide, including the Tate, the National Gallery of Australia, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.