John Hoyland
Royal Academy of Arts, London
30 September - 31 October 1999
John Hoyland is one of Britain’s most distinctive artists. During the early 1960s he was associated with Situation, a group of British artists who sought to take abstraction to a greater extreme, banishing reference to landscape and the figure and concentrating instead on the fundamental elements of painting abstract shape and formal relation, colour and scale. This retrospective of John Hoyland’s work is the first in this country for twenty years. It will comprise of some 25 paintings from 1960 to the present day - including early works never seen in this country since they were first exhibited to recent paintings never exhibited before. The exhibition will provide a concise survey of the growth of John Hoyland’s vision.
Born in 1934, John Hoyland studied at the Royal Academy Schools. His large abstract paintings which drew together an engagement with optical effects, formal strategies and strong subjective expressiveness drew critical attention in the 1960s. As the decade progressed, he established his reputation with paintings which became increasingly ambitious: combining expansive scale with bold fields of colour - occupied and traversed by a few subtly orchestrated shapes.
The 1970s saw a growing painterliness in which richness of surface, an emphasis on the application of paint, and an even more sensuous use of colour became hallmarks. A retrospective was held at the Serpentine Gallery in 1979. These characteristics laid the foundations for John Hoyland’s work in the 1980s and 1990s, a period which has seen the maturing and synthesis of all these elements. In John Hoyland’s recent paintings, reference to the visual world has been reasserted in imagery. Driving visual inspiration from his immediate surroundings in London as well as from his travels to the Caribbean - a long standing passion - his paintings are vibrant celebrations of life which continue to investigate the limits and possibilities of painting.
The exhibition is curated by Paul Moorhouse, Curator at the Tate Gallery.
ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS
Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1V 0DS
