ART CITIES:Rome-Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst’s wide-ranging practice includes installation, sculpture, painting and drawing. Consistently challenging the boundaries between art, science and religion, his visceral, visually arresting work has made him a leading artist of his generation. Hirst explores the tensions and uncertainties at the core of human experience. Love, desire, belief and the struggle of living with the knowledge of death are all investigated, often in unconventional and unexpected ways.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive

Damien Hirst in his solo exhibition “Forgiving and Forgetting” includes works from Hirst’s “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable”, a project that presented sculptural relics from a fictional shipwreck off the coast of East Africa, playing fast and loose with linear time, cultural origin, and perceptions of relative status and value. Foregrounding these sculptures against an intricately woven tale of seafaring exploits, marine excavation, and laborious research, Hirst aimed to invoke feelings of wonder at their meticulous physical and conceptual fabrication. The series debuted in 2017 with a suite of Treasures, ranging from pastiches of ancient and classical busts, masks, and statues to representations of iconic Disney cartoon characters. rendered in an extraordinary array of materials, many encrusted with colorful blooms of skillfully painted barnacles, as if salvaged from the ocean floor. The exhibition marks an ambitious phase in Hirst’s body of work; these sculptures are carved out of pink Portuguese marble and white Carrara marble, immortalizing each figure in one of the most storied materials in Western art history. Each subject in its monochrome marble assumes the same gravitas; the playful wave of a coral-laden Minnie Mouse is echoed elsewhere in the gallery by the outstretched hand of the female centaur Hylonome, whose statuesque form conjures both Baroque corporeality and the stately symmetry of French Neoclassical sculpture. Sparking unexpected interactions between ancient and modern, Hirst’s Treasures exemplify the idea of mythmaking that lies at the core of culture, both high and low. Hirst will also reveal his latest series, the “Reverence” Paintings. Originally seeking to reimagine the vibrant Cherry Blossoms in allover white, he began to overlay shifting dabs of color and flecks of gold leaf across the otherwise monochrome canvases, allowing them to take on a vivid and shimmering dynamism. Covered with bright impasto dots that add both perspectival grounding and visual haze to each composition, the “Reverence” Paintings underscore Hirst’s acute sense of color, expanding upon the expressionistic and pointillist impulses that have inspired his recent bodies of work.

Damien Hirst is the most prominent of the Young British Artists (YBA) that emerged in the 1990s. This group first gained notoriety when British advertising magnate and collector Charles Saatchi began buying and showing their work in his galleries. Like many of the YBAs, Hirst confronts big themes head on, including life, death, science, and religion. His mixed-media sculptures are created from a frequently controversial assortment of formaldehyde-suspended carcasses, cigarette butts, pharmaceutical packaging, and surgical instruments, often encased in glass vitrines. The earliest Hirst works to attract critical attention were his so-called “spot paintings,” an example of which is “Chlorpropamide (pfs)” (1996). The paintings are composed of hundreds of identically sized colored spots aligned into grids and named after controlled substances. In the Warholian tradition of repetitive, serial images, these unashamedly formulaic paintings use simple, cheerful means to suggest anxious questions, such as: Is art a drug? Do drugs heal or harm? Following the spot paintings, Hirst pushed further into this thematic territory by creating a series of medicine cabinets filled with drug bottles and pharmaceutical packaging, both old and new, symbolizing art’s reputed healing power. Hirst has continued to meditate on the rituals of nature and death in often monumental, headline-grabbing scale. His most famous series, Natural History, features formaldehyde-preserved animals in large tanks, such as “Away from the Flock” (1994), in which a sheep is suspended in fluid. The subject vacillates between its nascent, wooly state and its current lifeless, pickled state, referencing the sacrificial lamb as a representation of Christ. Hirst looks for an aesthetic beauty in death, often with the realization that beauty itself may depend on cycles of life and the passing away of matter. Such haunting beauty is found in “The Kingdom of the Father” (2007), a colossal triptych made of thousands of butterflies mired in house paint. The deaths of the butterflies add a sobering note to the astonishing grandeur of the paintings, made to mimic the stained glass of a church apse. By turning raw, physical matter into an object of seemingly metaphysical import, Hirst upends our assumptions about how images represent reality and communicate culturally. Damien Hirst in the context of 57th Biennale di Venezia, presented the monumental project that been working on for almost 10 years “Treasures from the wreck of the Unbelievable” across 5,000 square meters of museum space uniting Palazzo Grassi and Punta Della Dogana.

Photo: Damien Hirst, Five Friends, 2018 Carrara marble, in 5 parts, Mickey: 30 ⅝ × 17 ½ × 17 ¼ inches (77.8 × 44.3 × 43.9 cm), Minnie: 31 ½ × 16 ⅝ × 17 ¼ inches (79.8 × 42.1 × 43.8 cm), Donald: 29 ¾ × 20 ⅜ × 17 ¾ inches (75.6 × 51.8 × 45.1 cm), Pluto: 30 ½ × 21 ½ × 23 inches (77.4 × 54.5 × 58.2 cm), Goofy: 49 ⅜ × 16 ¼ × 24 ½ inches (125.2 × 41.1 × 62.1 cm), edition of 3 + 2 AP, © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2021. Photo: Lucio Ghilardi/Prudence Cuming Associates

Info: Gagosian Gallery, Via Francesco Crispi 16, Rome, Italy, Duration: 6/7-23/10/2021, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:30-19:00, https://gagosian.com