2025: Mia Boe

Work Details

When daylight fades and night invades: The shadow 2025
Colour screen-print on BFK Rives 300 gsm, painted gouache elements
35 x 22 cm
Edition of 15 (+ 3 AP)

When daylight fades and night invades: The portal 2025
Colour screen-print on BFK Rives 300 gsm, painted gouache elements
35 x 22 cm
Edition of 15 (+ 3 AP)

When daylight fades and night invades: The return 2025
Colour screen-print on BFK Rives 300 gsm, painted gouache elements
35 x 22 cm
Edition of 15 (+ 3 AP)

Printing: Negative Press
Framing: United Measures

Mia Boe, When daylight fades and night invades: The shadow, The portal, The return, 2025, installation view, colour screen-print on BFK Rives 300 GSM, painted gouache elements, Editions of 15, courtesy of the artist, Sutton Gallery, Naarm Melbourne; and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, © the artist, photography: Christian Capurro

Over the past five years, Mia Boe has garnered momentous critical attention for her painting-based practice. Her work engages with perceptions of justice, as well as the terrains of landscape and imagination. In consecutive bodies of work, Boe has positioned key figures as central, or as counterpoints, to the context of inheritance and disinheritance. From seminal Murri poet, activist and artist, Lionel Fogarty, to colonial art historical figures such as Russell Drysdale and Sidney Nolan, Boe positions relational knowledges and political histories within the context of a First Nations worldview. For the 2025 Gertrude Edition, Boe has worked with Negative Press to produce her first works using the process of screen printing. The flatness of this technique lends itself to Boe's painting practice, approaching perspective in a manner akin to expressionist set design with a nod to landscape-responsive abstraction. The three editions represent the arc of a day, from day, to dusk to night, to convey the passing of time, and phases of presence. Within these temporally shifting landscapes, Boe depicts three successive chapters: The shadow, The portal and The return. The first of which represents a sinewy figure reuniting with its imprint on Country, a place from which it has been extricated and distanced; The portal depicts the connection of body and place; and The return suggests a process of rejuvenation and transformation.

Mia Boe is a Naarm Melbourne-based painter from Meanjin Brisbane with Butchulla and Burmese ancestry. Selected solo exhibitions include Nocturnal House, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney (2025); Guwinganj, Hervey Bay Regional Gallery (2024); Imagined realistic minds, Sutton Gallery, Naarm Melbourne (2024); Going Insein, Gertrude Glasshouse, Naarm Melbourne (2023); and K’gari means paradise in Butchulla, CARPARK, Milani Gallery, Meanjin Brisbane (2021). Selected group exhibitions include And Still I Rise, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2025); Blak In-Justice: Incarceration and Resilience, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Naarm Melbourne (2025); Archibald Prize 2024, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Platform, Institute of Modern Art, Meanjin Brisbane (2024); The End of History, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia, Boorloo Perth (2024); From the other side, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Naarm Melbourne (2023); Thin Skin, Monash University Museum of Art, Naarm Melbourne (2023); Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Naarm Melbourne (2023); Making Place: 100 Views of Brisbane, Museum of Brisbane, Meanjin Brisbane (2022); and on the bank on the brink, Murray Art Museum Albury (2021).