Max Boyla (b. 1991)

Max Boyla (b. 1991, Musselburgh, Scotland) is an artist based in London, where he is currently a postgraduate student at the Royal Academy Schools. Holding to a tradition that sees painting as a form of illusion, Boyla’s art can be viewed as existing in a perpetual limbo: a place where the limited and real world mingles with the eternal and fictional. Recurrent characters offer a sense of familiarity as they navigate a foreign cosmos shorn of all sense of time and place. In more recent works, Boyla has turned to the tropes of advertising to explore fictional worlds closer to home: that of unlimited promises and a yearning for something better that by its very premise can never be real. Across all his work he asks: when the difference between real and unreal is so blurred, where does that leave our sense of being in the world?