John Hoyland Available

Exhibited: London, Royal Academy of Arts, Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition 1995. The 227th, 4th June - 13th August 1995, cat. no.691. Literature: Mel Gooding, John Hoyland, Thames & Hudson, London, 2006, p.165, illustrated

New Born Sun (Rising), 1994, is a stunning example of Hoyland's work from the mid 1990s, after a stay at the island of Bali. Hoyland is known to have travelled extensively, gathering experience, taking photographs and making constant drawings, all of which provide essential material for his imagery. In the mid 1990's his paintings took a new turn. His work from the late 1980's had been dominated by the roughly centralised calligraphic ideographs, an arabesque figure that appeared as if sky written against immensities of celestial space. Paintings from 1994 and after, such as New Born Sun, seen above, "have the character of things earthbound, subject to gravity or structually solid. They are unmistakable tree forms, pennants and flags, cascade of water, or fireworks at their apogee." (Extract from John Hoyland, Mel Gooding, Thames & Hudson, 2006).

This summer, 26 August, 2019 - Autumn 2019, six major Hoyland works will be drawn from the Tate's collection to be displayed as part of Tate Britain's spotlight series. The works on display chart the progression of his work from the late 60's until 2010, the year before his death. Hoyland constantly pushed the boundaries of painting with his bold use of colour, inventive forms and ever-evolving sense of what abstract painting could be. The Tate Collection currently holds 42 works by Hoyland.

"The need is for felt experience - intense, immediate, direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic." - Robert Motherwell

Hoyland's Bali Paintings: John Hoyland's paintings persist in an art of declarative pyrotechnics and sensuous generosities. Painting during a time when many of his contemporaries were wondering what to paint? how to paint? and whether to paint at all? Hoyland never suffered from these doubts, instead painting because he has no choice, because painting is his means to the poetic expression of his life. His work refuses to conform to canons of taste, or academic standards and transgresses categorical distinctions of experience between what is seen and what is thought and felt.

Hans Hofmann's famous statement of the meaning for him of abstract art - "to discover myself as well as I can" - applies in all respects to the work of Hoyland, who shares Hofmann's view of the creative impulse as the only thing artists have in common. "Everyone should be as different as possible"; and each artist in discovering himself or herself reveals something nineluctably of "the time to which we belong."

Hoyland is resolutely himself, courageously committed to the exploration of inner space with its brilliant darknesses and its silence, and to the revelation of its continuity with the phenomenal world of light and nature. Hoyland celebrates the sensory and the sensual, using colour, texture, space and form in dynamic configurations that correspond with a direct quickness to an intense experience of the world. His work creates in the viewer something equivalent to that intensity, and an awareness of its deeper intimations. Abstraction is perfect for this purpose as it avoids the distractions of incidental description and dissipations of energy that come with anecdote and representation. In it's isolation of effects and specific sharpness on aspects of things rather than on things themselves, abstraction magnifies and intensifies the actual into a new reality: the reality of the work mediated through the substantialities of paint. Hoyland's paintings are rich in reference to the world as seen and felt: to the colour and texture of objects and the atmosphere of spaces they occupy. It is in this way that Hoyland's paintings act not as a narrative description but as a "presentation of emotion" and "the expression of inner visions.

Each form Hoyland creates is evolved form a force he initiates. Staining and pouring, spilling and splashing, the spiral and wayward line squeezed direct from tube with the twist of the wrist or the swing of the arm, the applied energy of the brushed stroke - out of these movements emerges the image, the equivalent to remembered and imagined pleasures. Hoyland once wrote "paintings are not to be reasoned with, they are to be recognised...They are an equivalent to nature, not an illustration of it; their test is in the depth of the artist's imagination."

Despite his success, Hoyland often felt like a renegade in the art-world. An early example of this came with his final-year diploma show at the Royal Academy Schools in 1960. Consisting entirely of abstract paintings, it so shocked the RA's then president Sir Charles Wheeler that it was ordered down from the walls.

Hoyland has found an equivalent language for experiences that are personal, cultural, natural and topographical. During his time in Bali, Hoyland recognised things already encountered in his imagination, realities of colour, pattern and movement. Hoyland is a visual poet, a maker of evocative and memorable images and his paintings are an invitation to an imagined paradise.