John Hoyland RA

'I've always favoured abstract or non-figurative painting because I think the "withheldness" of it is more profound. I like painting that doesn't tell you all the answers, that leaves you to reflect upon it.' John Hoyland RA RA

Hoyland has been at the forefront a British abstract painting since the 1960's. He worked in New York during the 1970's with friends and influential artists such as Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko. Clement Greenburg introduced him to Hans Hoffman whose work affected Hoyland profoundly.

Mel Gooding in his book John Hoyland RA comments that his painting, 'with it's superabundance of visual and tactile effects, its intellectual and technical extremism, its overwhelming fantasy and evocative power, has been a powerful presence in post-war British art. Hoyland is the maker of thrilling images, and a colourist of genius. His paintings are invitations to active imaginative involvement, to speculation and to reverie. His disposition to the visionary - poetic is rare in English painting, as is the heroic scope of his artistic ambition.'

Hoyland continues to paint prolifically right into our contemporary moment. Andrew Lambirth in John Hoyland RA: Scatter the Devils comments that 'Hoyland's work of the 1990s and 2000s is more intensely dramatic than anything he's painted for 30 years principally because it's more linear. A whole new range of possibilities and contrasts has emerged to enrich his pictorial grammar.'

Hoyland has exhibited internationally including in London, New York, Munich, Milan, Montreal, Vienna and Toronto and more recently has had major retrospective exhibitions at The Royal Academy of Arts, London and The Tate Museum, St Ives. Public collections include the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Birmingham City Art Gallery, The Courtauld Institute, The Whitworth Art Gallery, the Tate Museum and The Walker Gallery, Liverpool. In 2010 Hoyland's work was included in the exhibition "The Independent Eye: Contemporary British Art From the Collection of Samuel and Gabrielle Lurie," at Yale Center for British Art in Connecticut, U.S.A.

The gallery also has a substantial collection of Hoyland prints available to view as well as his paintings.