John Hoyland

After leaving the Royal Academy in 1960, Hoyland was included in the influential Situation exhibitions and was later selected as a New Generation artist at the Whitechapel Gallery. In 1964, Hoyland first visited New York City, where he would go on to live and work for extended periods in the late 1960s and early 1970s. On returning to London after this first influential trip to America, Hoyland started work on a group of paintings that mark his artistic maturity. Mel Gooding describes the 1960s works as ‘an astonishing series of huge acrylic canvases of high-key deep greens, reds, violets and oranges deployed in radiant fields, stark blocks and shimmering columns of ultra-vibrant colour. It was an achievement in scale and energy, sharpness of definition, originality and expressive power unmatched by any of his contemporaries, and unparalleled in modern British art’ (Gooding, 2011). An early career retrospective curated by Bryan Robertson was held at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1967; in 1969, alongside Anthony Caro, Hoyland represented Great Britain at the Sāo Paulo Biennale in Brazil.

In the 1960s Hoyland titled his paintings solely with the date of their completion. In the early 1970s, at the suggestion of his New York dealer André Emmerich, he started to add words to his titles. At first these were not directly descriptive but instead, as he put it, offered ‘an oblique resonance’ which could be ‘open to interpretation’. In this period, the works are characterised by a sensitivity to the nuances of shape, staining, bleeding and texture. He began to use a palette knife and pollyfilla along with paint, building layers to form robust structures. The constructive process was still intuitive, creating a tangible presence within a dream-like space. By the end of the 1970s, London was again established as Hoyland’s principal home, although for the rest of his life he travelled widely, in particular becoming a frequent visitor to the Caribbean and the Tropics in general. In 1979 Hoyland was the subject of a second retrospective, at the Serpentine Gallery.

In the 1980s the orientation of his art shifted away from the transatlantic High Modernism that had developed in the wake Abstract Expressionism. He increasingly looked to earlier Modernisms, with the example of Joan Miró of especial importance. The move away from America heralded a more distinctly European set of concerns; but it also saw Hoyland find inspiration in cultures much more widely spread in time and space. The changes in his art in the 1980s brought with them a greater willingness to allow his paintings to allude to the wider world. Effects of chance were now embraced – pouring, splashing and employing gravity and resistance, allowing paintings to take their own form. The sensuous paintings of the early 1980s, alluding to the forms of fruits, bodies and faces, would morph into a cosmic, calligraphic language towards the end of the decade. Some of Hoyland’s influences and subjects, the objects, places and experiences which lie behind his visual language: shields, masks, tools, Avebury Circle, swimming underwater, views from planes, volcanoes, mountains, waterfalls, graffiti, the cosmos inside the human body, food, drink, music, dancing, relenting rhythm, the Caribbean, the tropical light, the northern light, the oceanic light. Borges the metaphysical, dawn, sunsets, fish eyes, flowers, seas, atolls. The Book of Imaginary Beings, the Dictionary of Angels, heraldry, Rio de Janeiro, Montego Bay. (Hoyland, 1980s)

In the early 2000s a figurative impulse became less insistent, although figuration never disappeared entirely. A solo exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1999 was followed in 2006 with a retrospective at Tate St Ives, and in 2015 a major survey inaugurated Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery.