“I really like making them. And I really like the machine, and I really like the movement. Every time they’re finished, I’m desperate to do another one.” —Damien Hirst
Beautiful, red, edgy, ejaculating, pooh, comet, purple, spunk painting, executed in 1997, forms part of Damien Hirst's iconic Spin Paintings series. Colors splash and twirl outwards from the center, exploding in all directions across the tondo. Like a giant, multi-colored eye, the work mesmerizes, pulling the viewer deeper and deeper into its spiral. Hirst, who shot to international fame as a member of the Young British Artists group, has “like no other artist of his generation...permeated the cultural consciousness of our time,” as praised by curator Ann Gallagher.i Hirst’s intense interest in visual experience, fascination with death and time, and playful openness to chance are all exemplified in the present work.
“I believe that after Pollock created a distance between the brush and the canvas by flinging the paint, there was nowhere to go with painting…but people still make action paintings. The urge to be a painter is still there even if the process of painting is meaningless”
—Damien HirstDamien Hirst embarked on the Spin Paintings in 1992, the same year that the prominent collector Charles Saatchi mounted the first of his legendary Young British Artists exhibitions, including the young artist’s formaldehyde work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Developing the concept and introducing a more participatory element, the following year Hirst and fellow YBA Angus Fairhurst set up a “Spin Art” stall at the artist-led street art fair A Fête Worse than Death. Dressed as clowns with body paint applied by the iconoclastic performance artist Leigh Bowery, they invited passers-by to create their own spin paintings for one pound each.
Damien Hirst [Left] and Angus Fairhurst dressed as clowns at their spin painting stall, A Fête Worse than Death, Hoxton, London. Image: Guy Moberly / Alamy Stock Photo After the initial success, Hirst scaled up the machine that spun the canvases and began to make paintings like the present work. The process in which Hirst throws the colors randomly onto the moving canvas involves a paradoxical balance between regimented machinery and total chance. He cannot know how the work will precisely turn out, instead trusting the colors to fuse and mix in a celebration of change. Reflecting the process of it’s making, Beautiful, red, edgy, ejaculating, pooh, comet, purple, spunk is alive, exciting, and, as the work’s title suggests, fun.
Visually recalling a spinning record on a turntable, the works have a conceptual lineage in Dadaist Marcel Duchamp’s kinetic collaborations, notably the optical effects that he generated with sculptural objects such as Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics), now forming part of The Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection in New York. However, while Duchamp’s focus on the mechanized and the optical attempted to remove the hand of the artist altogether, Hirst’s Spin Paintings retain a sense of vitality and individuality through the careful selection of paints and his direct application of them, recalling the performative and energetic application of Jackson Pollock’s poured canvases and the centrifugal force of his later works.
As exemplary of Hirst’s work, sharp conceptual consideration comes hand in hand with fun and surprise. Hirst’s Spin Paintings have been described as “memorials to the death of experience— memories of fleeting moments of immediacy and intensity.”ii In capturing the chance encounter of paint and canvas, Hirst continues his exploration of transience and the passing of time in a dynamic, irreverent and surprising work.
i Ann Gallagher, in Anne Gallagher, ed., Damien Hirst, exh. cat., Tate Britain, London, 2012, p. 11.
ii Andrew Wilson, “Believer” in Ann Gallagher, ed. Damien Hirst, exh. cat. Tate Britain, London, 2012, p. 205.
Provenance
White Cube, London
Private Collection, New York
Gagosian
Acquired from the above by the present ownerArtist 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.
347
beautiful, red, edgy, ejaculating, pooh, comet, purple, spunk painting
household gloss paint on canvas
diameter 84 in. (213.4 cm)
Executed in 1997.
Estimate
$300,000 - 500,000
Sold for $365,400
Patrizia Koenig
Specialist, Head of Day Sale, Afternoon Session
+1 212 940 1279
pkoenig@phillips.com
20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session
New York Auction 16 November 2022
321
This lot is no longer available.
326
This lot is no longer available.
364
This lot is no longer available.
372
This lot is no longer available.
381
This lot is no longer available.
393
This lot is no longer available.
