ART-PRESENTATION: Damien Hirst,Colour Space Paintings

The most prominent member the Young British Artists, who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s, Damien Hirst has shocked and surprised the art world with his unusual works, including glass displays of dead animals and medicine cabinet sculptures. His varied practice explores the complex relationships between art, religion, science, life and death.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive

Damien Hirst presents his “Colour Space Paintings” for the fist time in USA. Evolving from the iconic “Spot Paintings”, which are among Hirst’s most recognized works, the series revisit the free and spontaneous nature of his first two spot paintings from 1986, exactly thirty years later. As Hirst recalls, “My first ever Spot Painting was loose and painted with drippy paint and not minimal at all. In that painting, I was wrestling with what I originally thought of as the coldness of Minimalism and the more emotional Abstract Expressionist painting style I’d grown up with. At the time I painted it, it felt uncool and I abandoned it immediately for the rigidity of the grid, removing the mess, but after doing the Spot catalogue raisonné I’ve felt really drawn to that first painting and knew I’d revisit it eventually”. While the “Spot Paintings” were originally conceived as an endless series, the “Colour Space Paintings” are a body of work, commenced and completed in 2016. The latter adhere to some of the formal rules established for the “Spot Paintings” no single color is ever repeated in a painting, and the dot size, ranging from one quarter of an inch to four inches in diameter, is consistent within each work. However, without the logic of the grid and the symmetry of the perfect circle, the Colour Space Paintings appear looser, more stochastic, and more open to incident than the Spot Paintings. Here, Hirst’s imperfect discs overlap and jostle in a riot of color, like so many particles under a microscope. Colour Space directly follows Hirst’s exhibition of The Veil Paintings at Gagosian Beverly Hills, which opened in March. In the Veil Paintings, Hirst revisited his Visual Candy series of the early nineties, in which vivid colors overlap in loose ovals of thick impasto or pointillist-style dots. The Colour Space Paintings similarly reveal the interplay in his approach between the systematic and the painterly, the rational and the expressive.

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 4/5-10/8/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com