GROUP EXHIBITION

Through Colour Alone presents the expressive and structural force of colour as the unifying principle in the work of five painters who shaped post-war British abstraction. Across four decades and through limited editions, these artists demonstrate a shared conviction: that colour is both sufficient and transformative.

Patrick Heron, John Hoyland, Howard Hodgkin, Albert Irvin, and Gillian Ayres are central to post-war British abstraction. While best known as painters, each turned to printmaking to pursue questions that preoccupied them on canvas: How can colour structure space? How might an image form entirely through chromatic relationships? How can abstraction, stripped of representation, convey lived experience? The collected etchings, aquatints, lithographs, and screenprints from 1970 to 2010 highlight their persistent experimentation with colour, shape, and surface beyond motif or narrative.

The five artists represented here shared an appreciation for each other’s work and were collectively influenced by a pivotal event: the Tate’s 1959 New American Painting exhibition, which Heron reviewed and Irvin described as ‘like a bomb going off’. Heron’s advocacy for ‘colour, space and light’ as the core of painting established a critical context for Hoyland and Irvin’s large-scale abstractions, while Hoyland’s 1980 Hayward Annual, which included works by Hodgkin and Ayres, affirmed their shared commitment to colour as both structure and emotion.

The exhibition’s title, through colour alone—a phrase coined by Patrick Heron—captures the core of this presentation: for Heron, Hoyland, Hodgkin, Irvin, and Ayres, abstraction’s essence lies in the structuring and expressive potential of colour, independent of line, motif, or narrative. For these artists, colour is not a constraint but the foundation and freedom of their creative vision.