John Hoyland 28.2.69 1969
John Hoyland (born 1934) is one of the leading British abstract painters of his generation. This exhibition traces Hoyland's work from 1966 to the present day, affirming his position as a major, innovative force in post-war painting.
Hoyland's paintings of the mid 1960s forged a distinctive personal style, producing remarkable large-scale abstract paintings that advanced a startling use of extreme formal reduction and high-key colour. These paintings, showing Hoyland influenced by the work of artists of the New York School, drew attention for their defiance of the modernist insistence on the flat reality of the picture surface, emphasising instead the traditional quality of virtual, illusory space.
Since the 1980s, Hoyland’s paintings have developed far beyond their early formal emphasis, embracing imaginative invented allusions and the suggestion of other worlds.
