Essay accompanying the exhibition ‘John Hoyland: Stain Paintings 1964-1966’ at Pace Gallery, New York 2017 “It is only posterity that allows us to see art in perspective” – if I may paraphrase Henry Hazlitt in The Anatomy of Criticism (1933). You could fine-tune the adage by declaring that posterity’s most …
Read more >Essay accompanying a show at the Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli, Turin, curated by Elena Geuna. Hoyland is considered by many to be one of the greatest abstract painters of his generation. He championed the centrality of abstraction in the history and survival of modernist art. Hoyland believed that paintings …
Read more >Essay accompanying an exhibition of Hofmann’s paintings at Tate Gallery, curated by Hoyland. I first saw the paintings of Hans Hofmann in 1964 at the Kootz Gallery in New York. Clement Greenberg the American critic had kindly offered to show Paul Huxley and me around some of the New York …
Read more >Essay accompanying Hoyland’s first full-scale retrospective, at the Serpentine. It is [the] element of surprise in Hoyland’s painting which delights me more than anything else, and I am not suspicious of my motives in searching it out and enjoying the spectacle. Painting as charged and brilliant as Hoyland’s stands or …
Read more >John Hoyland, born in 1934, belongs to that generation of British painters whose careers were decisively affected in the late fifties and the early sixties by the impact of American painting since the war. He is also one of the very few members of this generation whose work is not …
Read more >Essay accompanying Hoyland’s first solo museum show Apart from the obvious size and radical colour of John Hoyland’s paintings, their main characteristic is energy and the concentrated force that its intelligent and sharply directed use declares. Force rather than passion, because the work seems to be the consequence of intellectual …
Read more >At thirty-one, John Hoyland has already a formidable backlog of original and unusually mature work to his credit, but has exhibited less than most of his contemporaries while enjoying a strong and solid reputation among his fellow artists as a serious thinker – and originator. He has worked consistently and …
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