Art & Photography: Hoyland, Caro, Noland

Thursday, 10 December 2015

Hoyland, Caro, Noland - Pace London

Kenneth Noland, Salute, 1963

Hoyland, Caro, Noland is at Pace London until 16 January 2016.
You wait years for a John Hoyland exhibition then two come along at once. Hot on the heels of the Newport Street Gallery's JohnHoyland: Power Stations: Paintings, 1964-1982 (continuing to 3 April 2016 - see below) Pace London presents a selection of his work alongside his contemporaries and friends, Anthony Caro and KennethNoland. It's a triumvirate which harks back to the heady days of 1960s Post-Painterly Abstraction when all the talk was of colour, form, 'staining', 'flatness', 'openness and clarity' (Clement Greenberg) and 'shape as form' and the 'primacy of the literal over depicted shape' (Michael Fried). The present grouping calls to mind Michael Fried's championing in 1965 of Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella and Jules Olitski. (Noland's and Stella's reputations seem assured - Stella currently being celebrated at theWhitney (a show I would love to see) - but Olitski has remained largely invisible, at least in the UK.

From the Pace Gallery press release:

Hoyland, Caro and Noland all emerged in the wake of the first generation of the New York School and sought to continue the legacies of their abstract forebears. Hoyland first met Noland in 1964 having already been deeply impressed by Caro's historic show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1963, the year before his own appearance there with the influential 'New Generation' Exhibition. Caro's work had shifted ground dramatically during his time in the United States, and his capacity for inventing new forms had made Hoyland recognise the value of meeting the artists, including Noland, who had had such an impact on his friend...

The friendship of Caro and Noland had first begun in 1959 when Caro found his ideas sharpened by his encounters with the American artist, who was a leading figure among the post-painterly abstraction painters that critic Clement Greenberg was at that time championing. Already well established as an important colour-field painter and figure in the Washington Colour School, Noland left an indelible impression on his British peer with his commitment to the exploration of colour’s psychic and phenomenological effects through serialized forms, including horizontal bands.
Read review by Robin Greenwood.