John Hoyland, R.A. (1934-2011)

'Paintings are there to be experienced, they are events. They are also to be meditated on and to be enjoyed by the senses; to be felt through the eye.'
Hoyland's work of the 1970s gave voice to an entirely different attitude, of insistent materiality, as opposed to the dematerialised floating wedges and bars of the 1960s. The surfaces of his paintings were repeatedly built up and scraped back, as texture became an overriding key to their identity. (A. Lambirth, John Hoyland: scatter the devils, Norwich, 2009, p.32-33).