John Hoyland (1934-2011)

Born in Sheffield, Hoyland studied at Sheffield School of Art and afterwards at the Royal Academy Schools. In his subsequent career, he has taught at various London colleges and schools of art including Hornsea, Chelsea, St.Martin's, and the Slade, as well as universities in the USAand Australia. His work has been exhibited widely in Europe, North America and Australia, and he has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Purchase Award (1963), an Arts Council purchase award (1979), joint first prize (with William Scott) in the Korn Ferry International (1986) and first prize of the Athena Art Award (1987).

In 1998 he won the Wollaston Award for the most distinguished work in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1991 and was appointed Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy Schools in 1999. Recently, he was given an Honorary Degree from Sheffield Hallam University. Hoyland's early interest in Nicholas de Stael drew him towards abstraction and under the tuition of Victor Pasmore, Tom Hudson and Harry Thubron at a summer school in Scarborough he began to experiment with colour. His interest in modern American painting was first aroused by Rothko, whose work was included in the 1956 exhibition held at the Tate, and developed further when he visited New York in 1964 with a Peter Stuyvesant Bursary, and met painters including Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski.

The critic Clement Greenberg introduced him to the work of Hans Hofmann and Morris Louis. For a while he began to spend more time in New York, immersing himself in the discourse of American painting. Its influence is evident in the painting exhibited here, where he uses the familiar devices of colour field painting and post-painterly abstraction to insist upon a modernist flatness, particularly in the stained ground and its spattering of paint globules, and the heavily weighted rectangle in the lower right, with its raised and scraped surface. Hoyland returned to live and work in London in 1973, rejecting reductive tendencies in favour of a renewed examination of the work of de Stael and the more allusive abstractions of Hofmann, exploring the expressive potential of colour, texture and structure, and using them to give his paintings a greater spatial depth.