ART CITIES:Moscow-Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst emerged as a leading figure in the Young British Artists movement His work calls into question our awareness and convictions about the boundaries that separate desire and fear, life and death, reason and faith, love and hate. Hirst uses the tools and iconography of science and religion, creating sculptures and paintings whose beauty and intensity offer the viewer insight into art that transcends our familiar understanding of those domains.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gary Tatintsian Gallery Archive
A selection of works by Damien Hirst is on presentation at Gary Tatintsian Gallery in Moscow. Throughout the course of Damien Hirst’s career, religion has been part of his work. Early medicine cabinets such as “God”, showed an unquestioning belief in scientific rationalism, the conviction that pills can cure you, against the more subjective belief in religion and the redemptive healing power of God. As mentioned by the artist: “I wanted people to think about the combination of science and religion basically. People tend to think of them as two very separate things, one cold and clinical, the other emotional and loving and warm. I wanted to leap over these boundaries and give you something that looks clinical and cold but has all the religious, metaphysical connotations, too”. Works like “Skull with pills” and “Something must break” (both 2008) are a manifestation of his critical outlook on a world determined by the economic quest for constant economic growth. In order to attain this goal, everything can be bought or sold. Financial success has become the measure of quality. Medicine has become the religion of the rich people and they believe that the technological progress will make them: better, eternally young, maybe even immortal. Science is necessary to achieve those objectives. Making use of religious imagery, titles and associations he transformed them through art, he bridges the theoretical gap between science and religion, rephrasing questions regarding the way the two are perceived. “I don’t want to tell anybody what to think, I just want to make you think, and make you think along with me. There are no answers, only questions, and hopefully the questions will help guide you through the darkness”, said Hirst. He has been using colored butterfly wings to give a churchy, stained-glass window effect in painting. The dazzling symmetry of his “The rose window, Durham Cathedral” (2008), constructed of butterflies and metallic paint on canvas, in which the fragility and extravagant color becomes the basis for a circular ornamental mosaic,replicates the medieval rose window at Durham Cathedral. It’s a recurring image in art history, the butterfly as the soul: fragility and mortality as a fragile beauty of life.
Info: Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Serebryanicheskaya Naberezhnaya 19, Moscow, Duration: 31/3-1/6/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 12:00-20:00, Sat 12:00-18:00, www.tatintsian.com
