John Hoyland

John Hoyland RA (12 October 1934 – 31 July 2011) was a London-based British artist. He was one of the country's leading abstract painters.

Early life John Hoyland was born on 12 October 1934, in Sheffield, Yorkshire, to a working-class family, and educated at Sheffield School of Art and Crafts within the junior art department (1946–51) before progressing to Sheffield College of Art (1951–56), and the Royal Academy Schools, London (1956–60), where Sir Charles Wheeler, the then President of the Royal Academy, ordered that Hoyland's paintings – all abstracts – be removed from the walls of the Diploma Galleries.

In 1953, Hoyland went abroad for the first time, hitch-hiking with a friend to southern France. After the bleakness of Sheffield it was a revelation: Hoyland visited again in 1957 with David Smith when he was at the Royal Academy, and succumbed to what he referred to as "the Gauguin syndrome", a lifelong romance with travel and the south. It was also the time when he made his first trip to America, to New York in 1964, travelling on a Peter Stuyvesant Foundation bursary. There he met Robert Motherwell, with whom he was to become great friends, also Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, and visited their studios. Hoyland's first solo exhibition was held at the Marlborough New London Gallery in 1964 and his first solo museum show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1967, curated by Bryan Robertson. Hoyland disliked the 'abstract' painter label, describing himself simply as 'a painter'. When asked why he disliked the term 'abstraction', he answered: 'It's just too abstract a word. It smacks always of geometry to me, of rational thought. There's no geometry, there's no rectangles in nature, no real straight lines. There's only the circle, the one really powerful form in nature I keep getting drawn back to.'

Retrospectives of his paintings have been held at the Serpentine Gallery (1979), the Royal Academy (1999) and Tate St Ives (2006). In 1982, he won the John Moores Painting Prize and in 1998 the Royal Academy's Wollaston Award.

His works are held in many public and private collections, including the Tate and Damien Hirst's Murderme Collection. In September 2010, Hoyland and five other British artists including Howard Hodgkin, John Walker, Ian Stephenson, Patrick Caulfield and R.B. Kitaj were included in an exhibition entitled The Independent Eye: Contemporary British Art from the Collection of Samuel and Gabrielle Lurie, at the Yale Center for British Art.

Hoyland was elected to the Royal Academy in 1991 and was appointed Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy Schools in 1999.

Death Hoyland died on 31 July 2011 aged 76, of complications following heart surgery undertaken in 2008. He was survived by his wife Beverley Heath Hoyland and his son Jeremy, from his first marriage to Airi Karakainen.

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