JANUARY 10 - MARCH 01, 2008
Drawing Space in Colour
Sharp Ceruleum over Deep Purple : November 1962
HRN-005-OC
Hackett-Freedman Gallery is proud to announce a solo exhibition of paintings by the celebrated British modernist and art critic Patrick Heron (1920–1999), January 10–March 1, 2008. This exhibition features a selection of works dating from the 1960s to the 1990s and will provide viewers with an introduction to one of the 20th century’s foremost colorists. This show marks the first U.S. showing of Heron’s work since his death in 1999.
Patrick Heron believed that a work of art’s greatness lies in direct proportion to its aesthetic qualities. He shunned symbolism and the literary in art, and celebrated the decorative; indeed, he often said, “I love images and hate symbols.” For Heron, color acted as “both the subject and the means; the form and the content; the image and the meaning.”
The extraordinary and luminous abstractions in this exhibition date from Heron’s mature period, which evolved in the early 1960s. Prior to that time, Heron worked in an abstract-figurative mode that was informed by the French modernist painters Matisse and Bonnard. In 1956, Heron saw an exhibition of American abstract expressionist painting at the Tate Gallery in London, an experience that led to his first series of fully abstract works, the “Garden Paintings” from 1955–56. Heron became a defender of American abstract expressionist painting in his criticism and its impact was felt in his subsequent work (although he later became highly critical of the movement and its chief advocate, Clement Greenberg).
Starting in the 1960s, Heron developed a new motif of floating disks on fields of color. Soon thereafter, he started to sharpen his edges and introduced a rigidity into the compositions. He created a new pictorial language of simple, but distinctive, interlocking shapes rendered in intense, daring colors—his famous “jigsaw” paintings. Heron explored this compositional device well into the 1970s. Towards the end of this phase, he began painting large areas with small Asian calligraphy brushes, creating remarkable contrasting textures that heighten the vibrato of the individual colors. After taking a hiatus from painting after the death of his wife, Heron re-introduced the “garden” motif with a series of works that are notable for their complex compositions and extraordinary depictions of light. In these late “Garden Paintings” the crisp edges of the forms dissolve and bleed into the ground while the brushwork becomes increasingly gestural. Many of these works are executed in gouache, a particularly favored medium of Heron’s and one that he prized for its fluidity, softness, and spontaneity.
Patrick Heron lived the majority of his life in Cornwall, England, and was closely aligned with that region’s famous St. Ives artist colony (founded by sculptors Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, and Naum Gabo). Heron was also one of the most influential art critics of the twentieth century. From the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, Heron played a key role in defending European modernism against British revanchism, and later defended British art against American cultural hegemony.
Heron has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, most notably at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1968), the Whitechapel Gallery, London (1972) and the Barbican, London (1985) among others. The Tate Gallery, London, organized a major retrospective of his work in 1998.
Heron’s work is held in major museum collections worldwide, including the Tate Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, and Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo; Boymans-van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam; and Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon.
Andrew Wilson is a curator of Modern and Contemporary British Art at the Tate in London. He is a leading authority on Patrick Heron and the author of the recently published monograph Patrick Heron: Early and Late Garden Paintings (London: Tate Publishing, 2001).
