Like burst balloons after a party: the last paintings of John Hoyland

When the internationally acclaimed abstract painter John Hoyland died in 2011 at the age of 76, a large chunk of light, laughter and danger went out of the British art world. Hoyland, who was born in Sheffield and trained at the local art college before coming to London and the Royal Academy Schools, was a force to be reckoned with. Reaching maturity in the 1960s, his career was established by a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1967, after which he divided his time for several years between London and New York. In the 1970s he settled back in London and Wiltshire, but travelled widely, often to the tropics. He lived hard and channelled his experiences back into his paintings. This made for richly allusive works which, although to begin with ostensibly abstract, became increasingly filled with marks and signs denoting the phenomenal world.

Hoyland did not stand still as an artist, and continued to develop his painterly language to the end of his life, exploring new visual ideas and re-examining his own preoccupations and former certainties. But he made his reputation as a formalist abstract painter, whose large, roughly geometric forms dazzle the eye and enfold the spectator in their extensive square footage. Public taste, and very often the taste of critics or commentators, tends to be retrospective, while that of the artist, interested not in what he has done but what he might do, is prospective. Thus with Hoyland. He moved on, but the art world didn’t manage to keep up. As a consequence, his early work is more highly prized than his later. This book sets out the reasons why we should give proper attention to his last paintings.