ARTIST OVERVIEW
Patrick Heron (1920-1999) was a leading British modernist, whose paintings are noted for their extraordinary color and elegant simplicity. Born in Leeds, Heron attended art school and then settled in St. Ives, Cornwall, where he became part of the artist colony founded by Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, and Naum Gabo. Greatly influenced by Braque and Matisse, Heron's earliest work was figurative but, by the mid-1950s, he began to develop a flat, abstract style that sustained him for the remainder of his career.
From 1945-58, Heron taught in London and was an influential art critic who played a key role in defending European modernism against British revanchism. He also wrote for Arts, a New York-based magazine, and was quite familiar with the postwar U.S.-based avant-garde, specifically abstract expressionism, a movement with which he is often aligned stylistically.
Prior to the 1960s, Heron worked in an abstract-figurative mode that was informed by the French modernist painters Matisse and Bonnard. In 1956, he 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 “Early Garden Paintings” (1955–56). Heron became a defender of American abstract expressionist painting in his criticism and its impact was felt in his subsequent work. (However, 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 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 Heron's 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.
