“I want you to get lost in them, I want you to fall into them, and I want them to delight your eyes”

—Damien Hirst

Comprised of four giclée prints on aluminium, Damien Hirst’s Veils (H4: 5-8) is a large-scale homage to the artist’s Veil Paintings executed in 2017. Presenting thick, colourful brushstrokes and the appearance of heavy impasto, the present work exemplifies the artist’s extended exploration of gestural painting and colour, while simultaneously attesting to his mastery of the painterly technique.

Realised in 2018-20, Veils takes the artist’s Visual Candy paintings from the 1990s as a point of departure – a series of contemplative, bright, and high-colour canvases produced in New York during Hirst’s early artistic career. Depicting numerous clustered and multicoloured dots of impasto, the Veils prints present constellation-like structures that seem to be in a perpetual state of transformation. Creating the illusion that the prints are composed of seemingly infinite layers, the present lot allows viewers to immerse themselves in Hirst’s world of vivid colour and grandiose gesture. 

In Veils, Hirst’s examination of colour and its effect on the eye recalls the post-Impressionist technique of Pointillism. Pioneered by Georges Seurat, this technique places dots of different hues next to each other – especially complementary colours, such as blue and orange or red and green – to enhance vibrancy and make the colours visually sing. In Seurat’s most famous work, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884–86), this technique is fully realised. Seurat used carefully positioned dots of colour to blend optically in the viewer’s eye, forming a cohesive and vibrant image from a distance, while up close, the canvas dissolves into a constellation of tiny points. In Veils, Hirst similarly utilises countless dots of paint in various colours to create vibrant layers of colour and shimmering effects.

While Seurat’s masterpieces are renowned for their polished and precise appearance, the studies for these works – such as Study for “La Grande Jatte” (1884-85) – are often characterised by looser brushstrokes, akin to those employed by Hirst. By placing different hues next to each other, Hirst plays with the way colours shift and merge in the viewer’s perception, creating a dynamic visual experience that echoes, yet transforms, the Pointillist tradition. Through the concentrated layering of painted dots, Hirst’s Veils seem to both reveal and obscure something from the viewer. When discussing the series’ title, the artist described:

“A veil is a barrier, a curtain between two things, something that you can look at and pass through. It’s solid yet invisible and reveals and yet obscures the truth, the thing that we are searching for.”

—Damien Hirst

Prior to the Veil Paintings, Hirst spent an extended period focusing on a series of minimalist paintings depicting a grid-like arrangement of coloured spots. First produced in 1988 and entitled Spot Paintings, the now infamous canvases were mostly painted by the artist’s many assistants. Characterised by a sense of mechanical reproduction, the Spot Paintings share the same orderly structure as the artist’s later Medicine Cabinets series. Conceived in 1989, the Medicine Cabinets series presents simple white shelves strictly organised with pharmaceutical pills and packages of prescription drugs. The Veil Paintings thus marked Hirst’s departure from the formality of the grid and towards a celebration of colour and abstract forms. As the artist exclaimed, “The veil paintings are a celebration!”. The Veils editions similarly capture this entrancing sense of freedom and joy, conveyed through expressive mark-making and exuberant colour.