BOYARDE

BIOGRAPHY

Boyarde Messenger is acknowledged as one of London’s most exciting artist photographers, having been short listed to the final judging day for the 2009 Terry O’Neill Award, "now widely acknowledged as the world’s leading photographic competition" and having received widespread acclaim, featuring in The Sunday Times Style Magazine,The Evening Standard, The Resident, The Art of England, and The Independent describing her work as showing "the hallmark of [a] gifted photographer".

Boyarde describes her art as covering the Body + Space, photographing fantasy landscapes by night and body painting nudes by day. It is Boyarde’s Pop Art Bottoms that she has become known for, selling to every corner of the globe with collectors reaching from London, Australia, The Royal Palaces of Jordan, Paris, New York and finally to Belize, Central America.

Boyarde combines hand painting and photography, describing the work as “highlighting… [her] playful personality, injecting it with humour and mischievousness, whilst liberating the object of desire, admiring its form, yet still confirming the vital balance between power and vulnerability.”

Boyarde has exhibited internationally with The Cynthia Corbett Gallery, with her first solo show in 2009 in Cork Street and has taken part in three Women In Art shows at the Mexican Embassy in Belize City, Central America. She recently exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery, London, with The Art of Giving: there she created a spectacular live installation of the female nude, exhibiting 4 hand painted women in her unique POP ART style, creating a fusion of art and fashion in the style of Charlotte Olympia shoes. The ladies were exhibited along side her POP ART BOTTOMS and caused a sensation, with the Evening Standard reviewing only Banksy and Boyarde, claiming Boyarde’s painted ladies and pop art bottoms to be the ’highlight of the auction’. The bottoms, in full swing continue to exhibit in New York, The Hamptons International Fine Art Fair and Palm Beach, Miami, with The Cynthia Corbett Gallery.

Boyarde, originally a portrait painter, studied Art at Bedales and Wimbledon School of Art following on to her other passion of photography, graduating with BA(Hons) in photography from The Bournemouth Arts Institute. Her photographic career started commercially, doing album covers and working with brands such as Smirnoff, but her art career instantly flourished after fusing her painting and photography background and she now lives part of the year in Belize, Central America. As an artist she has always been fascinated by the female form and the nature of it’s power, engendered in the ’pleasure of looking’ – Scopophilia. Her time spent in Belize has furthered this fascination and allowed her to develop her painting and photographic skills around the female body. After gradually breaking down barriers attached to nudity, she has now become a ’celebrity’ in Belize and is praised for addressing its stigma.

Although Boyarde is well known for her BODY art, SPACE is just as important. Her landscapes combine her aesthetic appreciation with the search for narrative. But in particular it is through her Night Prowls, transforming everyday scenery and the unspectacular, into an open film still, subsumed in cinematic style, to reveal void spaces energized by human interaction.

Some places have become habitual, safe places she visits everyday, to be re–examined through the quietness of night, or perhaps venturing into the unknown, "these un–peopled scenes awaken the boogie in a baleful moonlit masquerade that suggest dream states full of spectral narratives" (The Independent). Painterly in style yet photographic in composition, be it idealistic escapism or make–believe realism, these captivating, real–life landscapes give the viewer the perfect allegory.

"If you saw one of her buildings in your waking state, you’d run a mile, or sit and muse till dawn stole your vicarious vision". – The Independent

"Finding the unusual … is the hallmark of gifted photographers and [her]… series of photographs from Belize reveal the technical gifts and social documentarian lurking in Messenger’s closet". – The Independent

"A woman in love with WOMAN’ – The Belize Times