John Hoyland: Paintings 1967-79, Serpentine Gallery. The resistance to abstract art is amazing. After three-quarters of a century the standard view is still that it’s ‘just marks on a canvas’, decoration, not to be judged as serious art. Are Bach, Beethoven and Bartok merely decorative? Are Berlioz and Strauss the …
Read more >The John Hoyland retrospective which is currently on view at the Serpentine Gallery is full, as one might expect, of big, swagger, confident, abstract pictures, ablaze with colour. But there is more – much more – to be said about it than this. In fact, it is one of the …
Read more >1. Would you agree there is a crisis of function for painters, and if so how do you think it might be resolved? 2. Do you consider there is any one way of painting – i.e. figurative, abstract, constructist [sic] etc. – likely to be of more social relevance than another? 3. …
Read more >Read a fascinating interview from 1978 which reveals how Hoyland chose to deal with the legacy of Rothko
Read more >Following his historic show last year at Waddington, the modest chronology of paintings by John Hoyland in the ‘mixed’ exhibition of groups of work by British artists at the Hayward Gallery (too big and broad with too many officially licensed dullards as described by John McEwen in the Spectator of …
Read more >Magnificence is not a word that readily springs to mind when talking about English painters, either past or present. Turner, possibly – yet it is the word that comes to my mind constantly since being confronted with John Hoyland’s new paintings at Waddington’s Gallery II. It is the sheer physicality of …
Read more >If John Hoyland’s red and green pictures glowed, then over the last few years he has released the damper and sent the flames roaring up the chimney. Colour has exploded everywhere in sloshy lumps and scattered bits. He is currently having his second [sic, it was his third] show of …
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