John Hoyland
One of the defining post-war British abstract painters, John Hoyland built a language of colour, scale and movement that remains physical, emotionally charged and unmistakably his own.
Biography
Born in Sheffield in 1934, John Hoyland became one of the major figures in post-war British abstraction. His first fully abstract paintings were shown with the Situation group in 1960, and in 1964 he was selected for Bryan Robertson's influential New Generation exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery.
Hoyland's encounters with American abstraction expanded his sense of scale, but his paintings retained a distinctly personal intensity. Colour was never simply decorative: it became a vehicle for sensation, atmosphere and emotion, pushed through staining, pouring, layering and forceful gesture.
Across five decades the work evolved from the spacious colour structures of the 1960s into increasingly tactile, improvisational surfaces. Hoyland remained committed to abstraction as something lived and felt rather than merely formal.
Available works
Highlights
- Exhibited his first fully abstract paintings with the Situation group in 1960.
- Included in Whitechapel Gallery's landmark New Generation exhibition in 1964.
- Represented Great Britain at the São Paulo Biennale in 1969.
- Major retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery in 1979.
- Royal Academy retrospective in 1999, followed by a Tate St Ives retrospective in 2006.
References
At Indelible
Indelible's current John Hoyland selection spans very different points in the artist's career: 1973, Genie from 1988 and Nature Boy from 2007. Together they demonstrate how Hoyland's handling of colour and surface continued to shift while remaining immediately recognisable.
Genie is currently listed at £15,000, while Nature Boy is £8,000. The latter is an original 2007 acrylic on canvas measuring 51 × 61 cm and is presented framed.
Explore John Hoyland at Indelible or contact the gallery for condition, provenance, framing and viewing information.