Damien Hirst - 20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design Evening Sale Hong Kong Saturday, May 26, 2018 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

  • Catalogue Essay

    Bursting with tactile layers of blue, hunter green, red and yellow, Beautiful Bloody Revolutionary Supersonic French Spin Painting for the Amazing Anne presents an exemplary work from Damien Hirst’s coveted Spin Painting series. The circular canvas exhibits several splashes of vibrant colour that spring outwards from a central point, elucidating the unmistakable spontaneity that electrifies the series. According to Hirst, Spin Paintings are “a massive explosion of energy—full of life, colour and optimism.” (Damien Hirst quoted in “Damien Hirst’s monumental spin artwork in spectacular display at Olympics 2012 Closing Ceremony,” Artist’s Website, August 9, 2012, http://www.damienhirst.com/news/2012/olympics.) They recall the spinning of a record on a turntable, or Hirst’s long exposure photographic series that capture the movement of the stars.

    Beautiful Bloody Revolutionary Supersonic French Spin Painting for the Amazing Anne hearkens back to a 1993 collaboration between Hirst and Angust Fairhurst titled A Fete Worst than Death, an event curated by Joshua Compston in Shoreditch, London. Having constructed an impromptu spin art station, the artists offered visitors the opportunity to pay a mere £1 to create their own spin paintings to be autographed by the pair. This key body of work has since contributed to seminal exhibitions including Hirst’s 2012 retrospective at Tate Modern.

    Though Hirst’s extolled Spot Paintings are meticulously rendered by hand, both the Spot and Spin series analyse the theme of mechanical intervention. To create each Spin piece, paint is spilled onto a round canvas whirled by a machine at high speeds in reference to the optical experiments of Marcel Duchamp. Though Duchamp utilised motorised devices as a means of creating optical illusions, Hirst’s contemporary take focuses on the impressions of possibility, wonder, and elation evoked by the expression of movement. Beautiful Bloody Revolutionary Supersonic French Spin Painting for the Amazing Anne offers a highly animated painting by the inimitable Damien Hirst, one of the most globally renowned artists working today.

  • Artist Biography

    Damien Hirst

    British • 1965

    There is no other contemporary artist as maverick to the art market as Damien Hirst. Foremost among the Young British Artists (YBAs), a group of provocative artists who graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London in the late 1980s, Hirst ascended to stardom by making objects that shocked and appalled, and that possessed conceptual depth in both profound and prankish ways.

    Regarded as Britain's most notorious living artist, Hirst has studded human skulls in diamonds and submerged sharks, sheep and other dead animals in custom vitrines of formaldehyde. In tandem with Cheyenne Westphal, now Chairman of Phillips, Hirst controversially staged an entire exhibition directly for auction with 2008's "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever," which collectively totalled £111 million ($198 million).

    Hirst remains genre-defying and creates everything from sculpture, prints, works on paper and paintings to installation and objects. Another of his most celebrated series, the 'Pill Cabinets' present rows of intricate pills, cast individually in metal, plaster and resin, in sterilized glass and steel containers; Phillips New York showed the largest of these pieces ever exhibited in the United States, The Void, 2000, in May 2017.

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Property of an Important European Collector

51

Beautiful Bloody Revolutionary Supersonic French Spin Painting for the Amazing Anne-Sophie

2014
signed and inscribed ‘Damien Hirst for Anne-Sophie D.’ on the reverse; further signed ‘D Hirst’ on the stretcher
household gloss on canvas
diameter: 152.3 cm. (59 7/8 in.)
Executed in 2014.

Estimate
HK$1,200,000 - 2,200,000 
€129,000-237,000
$154,000-282,000

Sold for HK$2,000,000

Contact Specialist
Jonathan Crockett
Deputy Chairman, Asia and Head of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, Asia
+852 2318 2023

Isaure de Viel Castel
Head of Department
+852 2318 2011

Sandy Ma
Head of Sale
+852 2318 2025

20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design Evening Sale

Hong Kong Auction 27 May 2018