BOYLE FAMILY: The 1960s and 70s

A series of works by Boyle Family completed in the seminal period of the 1960s and '70s. This will be the first exhibition to focus on this period and is the first in a commercial London gallery since the death of Mark Boyle in 2005. It follows a major retrospective in 2003 at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.

Mark boyle and his co-worker and partner Joan Hills embodied the '60s spirit of experimentation. Their work included 'happenings' and art events, like Suddenly Last Supper (1964), in which burning slides of Botticelli's Birth of Venus were projected onto a nude woman, so that the real woman emerged from the idealised form of the painting; whilst Son et Lumiere for Earth, Air, Fire and Water (1966) gave rise to the psychedelic lightshow and collaborations with Jimi Hendrix and jazz-rock pioneers Soft Machine.

At the same time Boyle and Hills were developing the work for which they probably remain best known: the earth pieces from their Journey to the Surface of the Earth. These 'Earthprobes' as they were first called, present a replica of a random sample of the world, natural and man made. Whilst early pieces were made by a painstakin transfer of the real material onto boards, Boyle and Hills quickly developed techniques whereby a physical impression of the surface was taken and the details and relief preserved using resins and fibreglass. A selection of these quasi archeological studies were exhibited in the British Pavilion during the 1978 Venice Biennale and form the core of this exhibition.