Patrick Heron: The Colour of Colour: Paintings 1965-1977

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 exhibition. Today these paintings still hum with the same vibrancy and freshness which moved his audience over half a century ago.

This is the first exhibition of Heron’s work at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert and includes pictures from the artist’s estate which have not been shown for many decades. It covers the period when Heron made the ‘wobbly, hard-edged’ paintings exhibited here. He was so enthralled by their effects on visual perception that he spent a decade or so exploring them.

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.