Hales is thrilled to announce that the John Hoyland Estate has donated Sky Mirror II to the Chengdu Museum, China. It is currently on view in their donations exhibition through 2025.
John Hoyland (b.1934 Sheffield, UK – d.2011 London, UK) was one of the most inventive and dynamic abstract painters of the post-war period. Over the span of more than a half-century his art and attitudes constantly evolved. A distinctive artistic personality emerged, concerned with colour, painterly drama, with both excess and control, with grandeur and above all, with the vehement communication of feeling.
Sky Mirror II is an example of one of Hoyland's final works, a consolidation of five decades of experimentation, and the belief in the possibilities of paint to communicate depth of feeling and emotion. Contemplating his own mortality, there is a sense of the otherworldly and a connection to the void in these works. Hoyland’s use of a dark ground is formal, structural and emotive, and layered pools of paint evoke chance, freedom and vitality. In the darkness there are defiant and expressive strokes of swirling bright colour and floating orbs, implying hope and optimism even at the end of his life.
