Colour is light and sight. This is what sight makes available to you. And that colour has a million varieties and variations. So looking at something – anything – is more interesting than doing anything else, ever, as a matter of fact.– Patrick Heron
Well-known for his expansive colour-drenched paintings, Patrick Heron (1920-1999) was a luminary of post-war British art. With a grounding in figurative painting, his early works show a keen awareness of light, colour, and tone which developed over the course of his career into a practise centred entirely on these qualities within an abstract realm. Heron’s works are concerned primarily with the act and appearance of painting as referents unto themselves, without representational intent. As such, his approach to abstraction was often purely motivated by the interactions between different tonalities and their respective properties, arguing that colour and shape were inseparable from one another.
Heron was born in Leeds in 1920 but in 1925 moved with his family to West Cornwall, where he would latterly spend most of his adult years. In 1929 the family moved again, to Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, where Heron’s father Tom started Cresta Silks, a company that commissioned artists to design textiles. During the 1930s and 40s, Heron gained some early artistic success designing textiles for the company. Heron studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London from 1937-39 and, following his studies, worked as an assistant to British ceramicist Bernard Leach in St Ives (1944-45). While working in Leach’s studio, he became friendly with many of the major St Ives artists of the period, including Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, and Naum Gabo.
Heron’s early paintings gained critical and commercial praise for their rigorous approach, and his first solo exhibition was held at the Redfern Gallery, London in 1947. The influence of the French masters, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, and Georges Braque can be felt in these abstract-figurative works, particularly in the angular lines and overlapping forms. By the mid-1950s, however, Heron had moved away from figuration to focus more completely on abstraction, which coincided with his return to Cornwall. The Taschiste-like mark making in these works situated Heron alongside some of the most avant-garde painters active in post-war Europe. By the time Heron had his first US solo show at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York in 1960, his paintings were filled in with increasingly independent patches of flat, bright colour, a language that he would continue to explore throughout his career. He would go on to show new works consistently at commercial galleries until the end of his life.
Alongside his own artistic practice, Heron was also a prominent and prolific writer whose texts engaged with the zeitgeist of Modern painting throughout the mid-twentieth century. He was appointed the art critic for The New Statesman between 1947 and 1950 before acting as the London correspondent for the US magazine Arts Digest, New York (later named Arts (N.Y.)) during the late 1950s. Throughout his career he published important scholarship on artists that he admired, notably Ivon Hitchens (1955) and Braque (1956), as well as producing research and theory which underpinned some of his own practice, as seen in The Changing Forms of Art (1955) and The Shape of Colour (1973).
For his painting Heron won the Grand Prize at the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition in 1959 and the silver medal at the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1965. From 1980-87, he was a Trustee of the Tate Gallery, London, which held a major retrospective of his work in 1998. Twenty years later in 2018, Tate St Ives also held a survey show of his work which thereafter travelled to Turner Contemporary, Margate in 2019. Other significant retrospective exhibitions include at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1972) and the Barbican Art Gallery, London (1985).
Heron was awarded a C.B.E. in 1977 and has received Honorary Doctorates from Exeter University (1982), the University of Kent at Canterbury (1986), and the Royal College of Art (1987) amongst others.
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Pasmore | Heron
VIII São Paulo Biennial Great Britain 1965 - revisited 28 Apr 2025This exhibition of work by Patrick Heron and Victor Pasmore celebrates sixty years since they both represented Britain at the VIII São Paulo Biennial in 1965. The Biennial was a significant event for both artists and, also more broadly, for Britain as a country in establishing itself as one of the primary players in the development of abstraction on the international stage. The selection brings together ten examples by each artist dating from the period 1952 to 1964. Many of the works were included in the original São Paulo show and together they give a sense of the scale and impact that the original display had on an audience largely unfamiliar with British Modernism. Although the aesthetic differences between Heron and Pasmore’s work are stark, both artists shared a rigorous approach to their practice which allowed them to push the boundaries of abstraction down untrodden paths; Heron exploring the visual complexities of colour and Pasmore that of space. By 1965 both Heron and Pasmore had well-established careers in Britain and were producing some of their most important work. The significant influence that they each had on the development of abstract painting in Britain and beyond was recognised by their selection for the Biennial, and their shared artistic values and common interests made them as exciting a pairing in 1965 as indeed they remain today.Read more -
Patrick Heron
The Colour of Colour: Paintings 1965-1977 13 Feb 2025Produced on the occasion of Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert's first solo exhibition of work by the British artist Patrick Heron since the gallery announced its representation of the artist’s estate in 2020. Patrick Heron (1920-99) is among the most significant artists to have emerged in Britain after the war. He was a highly articulate advocate for the European tradition of painting, a tradition which he extended through his work. A fascination with the pictorial effects of colour runs through his entire oeuvre and arguably reached its zenith in the seemingly simple works he made between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, the subject of this film. Today these paintings still hum with the same vibrancy and freshness which moved his audience over half a century ago. Heron’s exceptionally sensitive eye for colour is as apparent in his earlier work as in his brilliant commentaries on the paintings of the three artists he revered above all others: Bonnard, Matisse and Braque. But it was with the type of paintings shown here that he made work that was fully immersed in the limitless realm of pure, abstract colour.Read more