Damien Hirst - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, November 15, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Gagosian Gallery, New York

  • Catalogue Essay

    "I always wanted to be a painter much more than a sculptor or an artist, but I was overwhelmed by the infinite possibilities of painting.  I think it’s got something to do with the void, the void of the blank canvas where anything and everything is possible beyond gravity, beyond life, in the realms of the imagination." (Damien Hirst, taken from R. Viollete, ed., I Want To Spend The Rest Of My Life Everywhere, With Everyone, One To One, Always, Forever, Now, London, 1997)   Although he works in a wide variety of media, from unconventional sculptural installations to paintings to video projects, Damien Hirst’s oeuvre is characterized by a rigidity and orderliness that belies his artwork’s traumatic concerns: witness the clean, minimalist lines of the vitrines that house his signature sharks and sheep, his precisely arranged surgical instruments in their display cases, the exactingly-spaced color spots of his pharmaceutical paintings; even his messier tendencies—animal entrails, cigarette butts—are fastidiously arranged and presented.  Hirst does not generally traffic in sloppy expressiveness, which makes the paintings from his Spin series a fascinating, if beguiling, anomaly in the context of his other work.   Inspired by early memories of the children’s television series Blue Peter, Hirst’s spin paintings are abstract, frenzied, colorful, messy, and possessed of a child-like explosive energy; they bear rambling free-associative titles such as beautiful, nasty, mean, heartless but colorful, optimistic, drug-induced, contentless, formless, thoughtless, uncreative, crappy but dappy, uncool, massive explosion, screaming, creamy, smooth, fill your heart with joy painting that make light of the elements of random chance and chaos that contribute to the composition of these works.  The present lot, Beautiful Where Did All The Color Go Painting, 1992, is unusual even amongst the Spin paintings for its muted palette of grays, whites, cool purples and pale greens rendered in the typical Spin painting style that is anything but muted.   The part of Hirst’s London studio dedicated to producing these paintings recalls the atmosphere of the so-called “brown cave” studios of the School of London painters, with thick, resolutely painterly paint splashed and strewn about, caked onto the walls, floor and ceilings.  In an ironic twist so characteristic of Hirst and his Young British Artist colleagues, however, the Spin paintings mimic the thick, textured paint and expressive application of the Abstract Expressionist movement and especially Action painting, yet they express nothing: the paintings are created by pouring paint from above onto a spinning canvas; often it is Hirst’s assistants who do the actual pouring in a nod to Warhol’s factory-like production process.  It is Abstract Expressionism adapted to Postmodernity; a laugh at the expense of the obsolete myth of privileged artistic genius and heroism embodied by Action painters like Jackson Pollack, and an acknowledgement of the reality that what once was considered uniquely expressive is now just another motif in the postmodern repertoire of styles available for appropriation.   “The urge to be a painter is still there even if the process of painting is meaningless, old fashioned,” declares Hirst.  “Today there are better ways for artists to communicate to an audience raised on television, advertising, and information on a global level…. [My paintings] are about the urge or the need to be a painter above and beyond the object of a painting,” (ibid.)   Challenged but undaunted by the weight of painting’s mythology, Hirst has cleverly and in typically cheeky fashion fulfilled his desire to paint both like Pollack and Warhol and in the process created aesthetic objects that are, in fact, quite beautiful in their wild combinations of color and kinetic energy.  In a manner befitting the world’s most notorious artistic provocateur, Hirst has confronted head-on the history of painting and its obsolescence in our contemporary media-dominated landscape and in the process capitulated to pure aesthetic pleasure.

  • 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.

    View More Works

10

Beautiful Where Did All The Colour Go Painting

1992
Gloss household paint on canvas.
75 3/4 x 60 1/4 in. (192.4 x 153 cm).

Signed “Damien Hirst”
on the stretcher bar; signed and dated “Damien Hirst Spin 1992” on the reverse.

Estimate
$600,000 - 800,000 

Sold for $690,600

Contemporary Art Part I

15 Nov 2007, 7pm
New York