“John Hoyland, Anthony Caro, Kenneth Noland” at Pace London until January 16 is one of the must-see gallery shows in London for the month of January. Taking as its point of departure the friendship between these three modern masters, the exhibition brings together a selection of works by each artist from the 1960s and 1970s that reveals the shared concerns that link their work, namely colour, form, material, and working in series.The mutual friendship between British artists John Hoyland and Anthony Caro and American artist Kenneth Noland began in Vermont in 1964 when Hoyland, who had travelled to the US on a Peter Stuyvesant Foundation bursary, spent time with Caro and Noland, whose friendship first began in 1959. Caro had returned to the US in 1964 to teach at Bennington College, which was close to where Noland was living at the time.“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,” Theo Waddington explains in the catalogue essay. “A series of fateful encounters brought the three figures together in United States in the early 1960s, engendering a productive working and professional relationship that left an impact on each of the artists’ practices.”Noland’s exploration of the psychic and phenomenological effects of colour through serialized forms had such an effect on Caro that he turned away from figuration and began working with the geometric forms that characterized Noland’s work. The work of Hoyland and Noland by their shared interest in the possibilities offered by the then new medium of acrylic paint which both artists used to explore colour, materiality, and form.“John Hoyland, Anthony Caro, Kenneth Noland” is the first presentation of these three artists at Pace London and marks Noland’s first exhibition in the UK since the artist’s death in 2010. The exhibition also follows the announcement of Pace’s representation of the estate of John Hoyland and coincides with the “John Hoyland: Power Stations (Paintings 1964–1982)” exhibition at Newport Street Gallery in London which is on until April 3 2016.
↧