JOHN HOYLAND | COLOUR FIELD (WITH A ‘U’)
John Hoyland, ‘Untitled - Stain Painting’ (1965), Acrylic on Canvas, 67” x 131” approx.
In 1964 a bold young Yorkshire-born artist went to New York, and mingled with the foremost abstract artists of the time – Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko – as well as the all-powerful critic, Clement Greenberg. After three months, having got through his grant money, he came back home.
That artist – just 30 – channelled what he’d learnt, and, over the next three years, set to work on a new series of monumental paintings, working exclusively in acrylics in his Primrose Hill studio. But he didn’t merely mimic what he’d seen, he Europeanised it… and in many eyes, moved abstraction into a completely fresh direction.
The artist was called John Hoyland, and the series has been called ‘The Stain Paintings’. Blond Contemporary Gallery will be showing one of these paintings at their stand at British Art Fair, entitled, like the others in the series, after its date of completion: ’03.09.65’. It is bound to draw the crowds.
As gallerist Philip Blond explains: ‘He began to stain his paintings with acrylics, as well as to apply pigment with brushes and rollers, creating varied edges, opacities and surfaces across his works. The paintings are dominated by large geometric shapes, but through his use of acrylics, Hoyland maintained a soft edge, with colours overlapping or seeping into each other and creating halo-like effects…”
This was reminiscent of Rothko’s work, but Hoyland was loth to completely abandon any suggestion of figuration and perspective, so his series, rather than aping the trendy Greenberg-influenced notion of two-dimensional ‘open space’, offered a three-dimensionality which hinted back to the European traditions of landscape and architectural painting. By channelling present theories, while simultaneously referencing those past traditions, he was travelling into the future.
“Around this time,” continues Blond, “there was an important evolution from cooler, graphic arrangements of shapes and relatively flat grounds, to increasingly rich and sublime colour spaces. Hoyland grew increasingly masterful at creating pictures that are simultaneously shadowy, luminous and emotionally evocative, while still rigorously controlled.”
Blond Contemporary will also be showing pieces by artists such as David Hockney, Bernard Cohen and Harold Cohen at Stand’s 14 and 15 at this year’s fair, and can be found at Stand 10 for SOLO CONTEMPORARY.