Derek Holland,is described by former pupil and Turner Prize winning sculptor, Richard Deacon, as “a wonderful painter, whose way of constructing through drawing, deconstructing through painting and then reconstructing with colour is completely absorbing.”
Derek Holland studied at The Central School of Arts in post-war London. He was soon a prize-winner in the prestigious Young Contemporaries and joined Roger Hilton and Keith Vaughan as a member of the Central School's staff. He exhibited extensively including The Whitechapel Gallery and The Redfern Gallery. He then took up a teaching post in the West Country, where he rejoined Roger and Rose Hilton, and made new friendships with fellow abstract painters and members of the Newlyn Artists’ Society, includingTerry Frost and Alex Mackenzie.
During the 60s and 70s Holland's hard-edge abstraction was regularly exhibited alongside the avant-garde of post-war British and European painting and his ‘Colour Field’ paintings would have surely guaranteed him an established place among his peers of post-war British abstraction.
Holland, however, was an artist of a different sensibility and more restless nature. In 1974 he gave up teaching and travelled to France filling countless sketchbooks made on return visits year after year, building up an inexhaustible supply of material to develop his subject matter, back in his studio in Plymouth, into the coastal and rural landscape of France.
Through his mastery of subtle, warm tones, Holland's paintings, like his hero Matisse, achieve a colour-created space, containing a light that radiates from within the painting itself. Over the course of a quarter of a century, his final mature style has developed; the increasingly restless brushmarks blending into a sublime radiant harmony.
Derek Holland remains one of the most original British artists of his generation.
with thanks to Francis Mallet, New Street Gallery