The first “critic’s preview” of Damien Hirst’s £25 million Newport Street Gallery was a sober, institutional affair, with the accent firmly on the work of the late John Holyand. And emphatically not on the person of Damien Hirst, who was nowhere in evidence and will apparently also not be present at the strictly 6-8pm private view next week. “We want to focus on the exhibition”, said Hugh Allan during the preview of John Hoyland: Power Stations (8 October-3 April 2016). Allan—who is the senior curator of Newport Street and also the director of Hirst’s Other Criteria business—worked with the absent artist to hang the six-room show of 33 works from Hirst’s private Murderme collection.
To this end, the gathering—which included John Hoyland’s son Jeremy and his widow Beverley—were treated to a passionate and illuminating introduction from the writer, critic and Hoyland-expert Mel Gooding. In his speech Gooding declared that he didn’t know Hirst, but that he heartily agreed with the younger artist’s disarming statement to Hoyland that “you’re obviously the greatest British abstract painter by far.” According to Gooding the three qualities that made Hirst feel this way, and which compelled him to invest so heavily in Hoyland’s work, were its “enormous vitality”, it’s “full-on optical radiance”, and the fact that the work “never stands still: it is a project without a programme, sustained by continuous spontaneity.”
Certainly all of the above characteristics are in abundant evidence in what is a stunning, spare—but absolutely not sober—sequence of gloriously vivid works. They have been chronologically grouped to span a very particular “pivotal” period in Hoyland’s career—from 1964-82—when he was processing the influence not only of American abstract painting but also the new abstract sculpture of the time, especially that of Antony Caro, and infusing it with his own evocative, emotional and ultimately European charge. Power Stations is an apt collective title for these bold and beautiful paintings, which utterly bear out Hoyland’s statement that “paintings are there to be experienced, they are events.”
But the title can also apply to the lofty, beautifully proportioned top lit galleries designed by Caruso St John. They provide a grand and generous setting for this long overdue re-assessment of an artist who, since his death in 2011, has not had the recognition he deserves. As Nicholas Serota states in his carefully worded introduction to the exhibition catalogue: “the response of artists to history is often very different to that of curators who more usually decide what is on view in museums and galleries.”
