Press |  1980s  | 

‘Eight from England: Images that make themselves’

John Hoyland muses on the state of painting. Making art is an experience combining intellect, skill and intuition: it’s an experiment with what the artist imagines might be possible. The artist takes a chance and, if successful, anticipates what is possible experience. He does this by inventing new relationships which …

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Press |  1970s  | 

‘Campaigns in Colour’ by John Spurling

John Hoyland: Paintings 1967-79, Serpentine Gallery. The resistance to abstract art is amazing. After three-quarters of a century the standard view is still that it’s ‘just marks on a canvas’, decoration, not to be judged as serious art. Are Bach, Beethoven and Bartok merely decorative? Are Berlioz and Strauss the …

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Press |  1970s  | 

‘Waiting for the click… ’ by Edward Lucie-Smith

The John Hoyland retrospective which is currently on view at the Serpentine Gallery is full, as one might expect, of big, swagger, confident, abstract pictures, ablaze with colour. But there is more – much more – to be said about it than this. In fact, it is one of the …

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Press |  1970s  | 

‘Painting today: a questionnaire’

1. Would you agree there is a crisis of function for painters, and if so how do you think it might be resolved? 2. Do you consider there is any one way of painting – i.e. figurative, abstract, constructist [sic] etc. – likely to be of more social relevance than another? 3. …

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Press |  1970s  | 

‘John Hoyland’ interviewed by Adrian Searle

Read a fascinating interview from 1978 which reveals how Hoyland chose to deal with the legacy of Rothko

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Press |  1970s  | 

‘Looking for Hoyland’ by Bryan Robertson

Following his historic show last year at Waddington, the modest chronology of paintings by John Hoyland in the ‘mixed’ exhibition of groups of work by British artists at the Hayward Gallery (too big and broad with too many officially licensed dullards as described by John McEwen in the Spectator of …

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Press |  1970s  | 

‘Review’ by Eddie Wolfram

Magnificence is not a word that readily springs to mind when talking about English painters, either past or present. Turner, possibly – yet it is the word that comes to my mind constantly since being confronted with John Hoyland’s new paintings at Waddington’s Gallery II. It is the sheer physicality of …

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