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 >Prodigiously creative abstract artist whose ultra-vivid work went to painting’s extremes. A painter and printmaker of prodigious creative energy and imagination, John Hoyland, who has died aged 76 of complications following heart surgery in 2008, was widely recognised as one of the greatest abstract artists of his time. From the …
Read more >When we asked Damien Hirst if he would discuss his ‘return to painting’, he suggested a conversation with leading abstract artist John Hoyland RA. As both artists prepared for new London shows in Autumn 2009, they met in John Hoyland’s studio. Damien Hirst, born in 1965, is known for the …
Read more >John Hoyland has been called Europe’s answer to Mark Rothko. On a visit to his London studio, Esther Walker discovers why the celebrated painter has turned to Robert Fisk of The Independent for inspiration in his latest artworks. “I borrow anything from anything,” says the artist John Hoyland. “I’ll borrow …
Read more >This small but telling retrospective at Tate St Ives is one of a number of Hoyland exhibitions timed to coincide or overlap this summer. There have already been a couple of commercial shows of recent and older work in London, and another has just opened at the Lemon Street Gallery …
Read more >Charles Hall finds a dazzling new freedom in the work of one of England’s leading abstract painters. John Hoyland has always been a virtuoso painter, but the paintings in his new ‘Bali’ series look more daring and assured than anything he has previously attempted: his sugary, metallic, unashamedly synthetic palette …
Read more >A recent spell in Bali has affected John Hoyland, prompting violent clashes and disturbances, a use of acrylics that mocks the controlled slippages and seepages of younger generation abstract painters. His paintings, at Theo Waddington, look astonishingly off-hand. Thick ejaculations hit tropic-nocturnal stained grounds. These in turn host squiggles of …
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