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 >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 …
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 >In most English painting since the war, colour has seldom been an issue. It was localised into blandness, it sat on the surface of the picture and it worked as icing on the cake of form: ‘Look what a pretty patch I am.’ The development of colour as a consistent …
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 …
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