John Hoyland valuation
British abstraction at American scale, from stained colour fields to slabs of paint laid on with a knife.
John Hoyland was born in Sheffield in 1934 and trained at the Royal Academy Schools, where the abstract work he submitted for his diploma nearly cost him it.
What a work by John Hoyland is worth
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Bio
John Hoyland was born in Sheffield in 1934 and trained at the Royal Academy Schools, where the abstract work he submitted for his diploma nearly cost him it. A visit to New York in 1964 and friendships with Motherwell, Newman and Hofmann set the direction: large canvases, acrylic stained or poured into the weave, blocks of saturated colour floating against a field. From the mid-1970s the surface thickened dramatically, with paint troweled, poured and dragged in slabs, and the later work brought in overt shapes and a much more exotic palette after trips to the Caribbean and Bali. He was elected to the Royal Academy and died in 2011.
The three phases are visually very different and are valued differently, so the date does most of the work in identifying a picture — the 1960s and early 1970s stained canvases are the period the market treats as the core. Titles are typically a date, which is how individual works are distinguished, and the signature, title and date are normally on the reverse. Acrylic on unprimed or thinly primed canvas stains permanently and cannot be cleaned, and the thick later surfaces chip. Prints and works on paper exist in quantity.
At a glance
- Born
- 12 October 1934, Sheffield
- Died
- 31 July 2011, London
- Movement
- Contemporary art
More on Wikipedia.
Situation, the retrospectives and Newport Street
Hoyland was in the Situation exhibitions in London at the start of the 1960s, which showed large abstract pictures meant to fill the field of vision. He had retrospectives at the Serpentine in 1979, the Royal Academy in 1999 and Tate St Ives in 2006, won the John Moores Painting Prize in 1982 and the Royal Academy's Wollaston Award in 1998, and died in 2011.
Damien Hirst, who collected his work, opened Newport Street Gallery in London in 2015 with an exhibition of Hoyland's paintings of the 1960s, Power Stations. Because titles are usually dates, the date and dimensions together identify a picture in the exhibition records.
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