OUGD502 - Brief 01 - Exhibition Visit - John Hoyland @ Newport Street Gallery

Towards the end of the Christmas break, I paid a visit to the recently opened Newport Street Gallery in Vauxhall, South London. Newport Street Gallery presents exhibitions of work drawn from Damien Hirst’s art collection as well as other well established and emerging artists. Housed within a renovated Victorian scenery-painting studio, the gallery is spacious and modern and was a real pleasure to experience.

“Paintings are there to be experienced … [they] are not to be reasoned with, they are not to be understood, they are to be recognised.” – John Hoyland, 1979

John Hoyland (1934–2011) is one of Britain’s leading abstract painters. Renowned for his intuitive manipulation of colour, form, line and space, Hoyland emerged at the forefront of the abstract movement in Britain in the early 1960s, and remained an energetic and innovative force within the field, until his death in 2011. Hoyland’s rejection of figurative painting occurred in the late 1950s following his introduction to the work of American abstract expressionists such as Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. The young artist was also informed by the emergence of formalist theory as a major innovating force within British sculpture, as exemplified by the work of Anthony Caro, with whom Hoyland was to become a collaborator and close friend. Describing abstraction as a ‘revolution of twentieth century art’, Hoyland began making early enquiries into how rational thought and visual perception could be used as the sole basis for pictorial composition

‘Power Stations’, Newport Street Gallery’s inaugural exhibition, presents a selection of Hoyland’s large-scale works dating from 1964 to 1982, displayed throughout all six of the gallery’s exhibition spaces. The first major survey of the artist to be presented since 2006, ‘Power Stations’ spans a pivotal period in Hoyland’s career, punctuated by his first solo museum show, at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1967, and his defining retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery (1979–80).

The works in the exhibition can be grouped into loose chronological series, in which the formal techniques and motifs developed in one are built onand transformed in the next. The foregrounds of the 1960s works, strongly represented in ‘Power Stations’, characteristically feature abutting quasi-geometric shapes that float freely from the canvas edge. These forms emerge from dramatic walls of colour, washes of acrylic in hues of greens and reds that supersede and interact with each other on the canvas surface.

What I took away from the show:

Abstract art is something I have developed a keen interest for over my years in art education. Before going to this exhibition, I had very limited knowledge of Hoyland as an artist, so going to the show was very enlightening and enjoyable. I really loved his use of colour and the rich textures he created with the thick application of the paint. I try to incorporate abstract elements into my graphic design practice wherever I can, I came away feeling positive and inspired and the fact that it was a free show made the entire experience that little bit better. It was also nice visiting a part of London that I hadn't explored much before and seeing a new gallery space for the first time.