Boyle Family

Turske & Turske Gallery, Zurich

The surface of the work is intentionally pitted and uneven. The work is in very good condition. Unframed.
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Mark Boyle and Joan Hills were already building a reputation in the artistic counter-culture of the 1960s with assemblages, light shows and happenings when in 1965 they began making relief sculptures of randomly selected sites amongst the wastelands and building sites of a London in flux. Having acquired a large map of the area around Shepherd's Bush, Boyle would invite friends to throw darts at it and the resulting areas were used as subjects for the works. Over the next few years the project developed both technically and conceptually into their Journey to the Surface of the Earth. The resulting earth studies, made with painstaking accuracy, present slices of reality unmediated and unadorned, evidence of the surrounding world.

Mark Boyle described his desire to present something new to the viewer in 1965.

The most complete change an individual can affect in his environment, short of destroying it, is to change his attitude to it. From the beginning we are taught to choose, to select, to separate good from bad, best from better. (Mark Boyle, Control Magazine, No.1, 1965).

Although always collaborative (the Boyle children Sebastian and Georgia were involved from their earliest days), works were initially exhibited as by Mark Boyle and it was only in 1985 that exhibitions named the works as by the Boyle Family. In 1986, three years before the present work was produced, the Boyle Family described their aim in more detail.

We want to see if it's possible for an individual to free himself from his conditioning and prejudice. To see if it's possible for us to look at the world or a small part of it, without being reminded consciously or unconsciously of myths and legends, art out of the past or present, art and myths of other cultures. We also want to be able to look at anything without discovering in it our mothers' womb, our lovers' thighs, the possibility of handsome profit or even the makings of an effective work of art. We don't want to find in it memories of places where we suffered joy and anguish or tenderness or laughter. We want to see without motive and without reminiscence this cliff, this street, this field, this rock, this earth. (Boyle Family, Beyond Image, Hayward Gallery 1986).

The Fire Series was executed on a demolition site in London in 1989. It continued the Boyle Family interest in such sites as areas of change and acknowledged the elemental forces that feature in many of their works and early projection pieces such as Son et Lumiere for Earth, Air, Fire and Water (1966).

We are grateful to Sebastian Boyle for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of this lot.