Paintings of John Hoyland on display at Tate Britain

BY JAMES TWOMEY

A display of paintings by John Hoyland are set to go on display as part of the Spotlights series at Tate Britain.

The six major works included are drawn from the Tate’s collection, with the display showing the progression of Hoyland’s work from the late 1960s until 2010, the year before his death.

He is thought of as one of the most important British abstract expressionists of the 20th century and is known for his large, colourful and dramatic canvases.

The Tate Collection currently holds 42 works by Hoyland and says he constantly pushed the boundaries of painting with his bold use of colour, inventive forms and ever-evolving sense of what an abstract painting could be.

Curator Andrew Wilson has selected paintings from 1969 to 2010, showing the marked difference between Hoyland’s early and late work.

The six paintings show the arc of the artist’s work as it evolved from the huge colour-stained canvases of the 1960s through to the textured surfaces of the 1970s.

These are followed by the more spatially complex and improvised paintings of the 1980s and then the semi-figurative work first inspired by the artist’s travels to Bali in the 1990s.

Art critic Andrew Lambirth said Hoyland’s paintings were “abstracts but they are not about absolutes.

They are about very particular emotions, thoughts and feelings dependent upon the act of looking.”