These Mad Hybrids:
John Hoyland and Contemporary Sculpture

In 1994 painter John Hoyland made an unruly group of ceramic sculptures. Loaded with colour, humour and creatureliness, he dubbed them ‘these mad little hybrids’. They now appear remarkably contemporary, in sync with a broad range of recent and current sculpture. These Mad Hybrids: John Hoyland and Contemporary Sculpture presents the ceramics in dialogue with sculpture by Caroline Achaintre, Eric Bainbridge, Phyllida Barlow, Olivia Bax, Hew Locke, Anna Reading, Jessi Reaves, Andrew Sabin, John Summers and Chiffon Thomas. 

Essays by Olivia Bax and Sam Cornish situate the ceramics within contemporary sculptural discourse and in relation to Hoyland’s deep personal engagement with sculpture. How and why could a sculpture be funny? How did sculpture help an abstract painter rethink his relationship with the High Modernist tradition and find a new relationship with the wider world? James Fisher considers hybridity in the guise of an imaginary dialogue with King Kong, while Hannah Hughes’s visual essay explores the Polaroid photographs that Hoyland employed to help move his dramatic and powerful imagery between two and three dimensions. 

This book was published to coincide with the touring exhibition of the same name curated by Olivia Bax, Sam Cornish and Wiz Patterson Kelly, for the UK venues Royal West of England Academy (RWA), Bristol, 2 February to 12 May 2024 and Millennium Galleries, Sheffield, 20 February to 18 May 2025.

Edited by Olivia Bax, Sam Cornish, Andrew Hunt, Wiz Patterson Kelly, and Sophie Kullmann.

Designed by Michael Dyer, Remake.

Softback, 128 pages, 95 colour illustrations, 1 b+w illustration, 260mm x 210mm.

This book is co-published with Ridinghouse.

ISBN: 978-1-910516-30-0