Daniel Boyd Treasure Island

Daniel Boyd: Treasure Island is the artist’s first major exhibition to be held in an Australian public institution. Featuring more than 80 works from across his nearly two-decade career, the exhibition unpacks the ways in which Boyd holds a lens to colonial history, explores multiplicity within narratives and interrogates blackness as a form of First Nations resistance.

Working with an idiosyncratic painting technique that partially obscures the composition, Boyd refigures archival imagery, art historical references and his own family photographs, asking us to contend with histories that have been hidden from view.

The exhibition, in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ historic South Building, includes new work and commissioned spatial interventions. Highlights include his iconic early work Treasure Island 2005; Untitled (ZVDG) 2014 from his famed History is made at night (Kochi) series; and the intimate Untitled (BAT) 2020, one of the artist’s first large-scale works drawing from his personal archive of lived experiences and memories.

As well as revealing some of the richness and diversity of contemporary Indigenous art practices, and Australian contemporary art more broadly, Daniel Boyd: Treasure Island offers a thoughtful and thought-provoking response to the current moment. It is accompanied by a richly illustrated publication, featuring all new writing by the exhibition’s co-curators and commissioned First Nations authors, offering critical insight into Boyd’s practice as well as creative and experimental responses to his work.