58 Bermondsey Street
London SE1 3UD
Flying Wild marks what would have been John Hoyland’s 90th birthday year.
When considering Hoyland’s five decades of creative output, you cannot fail to acknowledge his fearless approach to his work, born out of a passion for the wider world, cultures of far-flung places, away from the grey of his native Sheffield. From his first trip abroad as a student on the Cote d’Azur, to his many years spent visiting Jamaica with his wife Beverley, he was constantly driven to find new and surprising visual poetry. Back in the London studio these experiences fed into the music, heat and light of his paintings and allowed him to create images that seem to have come from another dimension. Hoyland was a tireless traveller of the imagination.
This expansive mindedness and willingness to ‘try anything’ freed him up to create some extraordinary bodies of work, including ceramic and glass sculptures, theatre sets and costumes for the Ballet Rambert, and a mosaic mural for the Rome Metro. However, Hoyland’s printmaking is as much a vital part of his artistic legacy as his painting, showcasing his innovation and mastery of colour and form.
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Printmaking involved a different sort of artistic journey - from the isolation of his painting studio to the social environment of the workshop - the necessity of working collaboratively with master printmakers forced a welcome change in mindset. Without surrendering his vision, Hoyland needed the printmakers’ expertise and technical knowledge. Labouring and risk-taking together allowed for ‘unexpected encounters and intuitive irrational choices’ during a process where one could equally ‘talk and chat and have a laugh and listen to the radio’. Hoyland experimented with various techniques, including screen printing and lithography, etching and monoprinting, pushing the possibilities, subverting the norms, allowing him to explore texture and layering in unique ways. His prints of the 1960s followed his paintings, but by the early 1980s, the prints begin to have their own independent life, their own ways of transforming the poetry of the world into varied powerful and surprising images.
In this selected survey of works on paper, we explore the relationships between his printmaking and painting, where these practices overlap and where they differ to offer a snapshot Hoyland’s practice from 1978 to 2006.
- Wiz Patterson Kelly, John Hoyland Estate
A catalogue is available for this exhibition and can be purchased online here.
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Paintings: 1978 - 1988
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'The vitality, the juice and the intense color make a lot of the pictures we have around collapse… I like very much the particular diagonal preoccupation you have now, which, oddly enough in '75 and '76 I also experimented with, taking off from my old ‘Africa’ that must go back nearly 20 years. It’s a funny thing about the diagonal. It’s almost like a wrestling match. Once one gets involved in it, one can’t let go and the damned diagonal won’t let go either. I finally gave up in defeat. But I was doing it with black, and I think your using color makes much more sense. Somehow you make it sing in a way I was never able to manage. Anyhow, we are quite overwhelmed by owning the work, and also by the constant reminder of your actual presence, which we miss’.
Extract from a letter to John Hoyland from Robert Motherwell, to whom he had gifted one of the 8th Street Series paintings
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John HoylandThe Pacific Series - Untitled No 9, 1981£15,500.00 -
John HoylandThe Pacific Series - Untitled No 8, 1981£15,500.00
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John HoylandThe Pacific Series - Untitled No 13, 1981£15,500.00
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John HoylandThe Pacific Series - Untitled No 18 , 1981£15,500.00
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John HoylandUntitled 2, 1985£12,800.00
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John HoylandKing in a Cage, 1988£13,500.00
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John HoylandThe Pacific Series - Untitled No 20 , 1981£15,500.00
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Etchings and monotypes: 1981 - 1986
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Jamaica Series II
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Paintings and monotypes from the 1990s
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Untitled 22 (Babalazi)
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Later Etchings
- Archive images courtesy of the John Hoyland Estate
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Eames Fine Art | Film Archive
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John Hoyland | Relentless Rhythm
Watch Vincent Eames introduce our John Hoyland exhibition at the Eames Fine Art Gallery October 21, 2021 -
John Hoyland | Show Highlights with Andrew Marr
Join Andrew Marr discussing his picks for the show with Vincent Eames. October 21, 2021 -
John Hoyland | Possibilities of Print
Panel discussion with Kip Gresham, Nigel Oxley and Edward Twohig November 11, 2021
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At a glance in the gallery | John Hoyland: Flying Wild
