‘The movement sort of implies life’ – Damien Hirst

An enthralling tondo that transports the viewer into a vortex of colour and movement, Beautiful tropical, jungle painting (with pink snot), 1998, forms part of Damien Hirst’s celebrated series of Spin Paintings, which he first conceptualised in his Brixton studio in 1992, and tentatively introduced to the public as a participative method in 1993. In the summer of that year, Hirst and his peer Angus Fairhurst – both dressed as clowns – set up a ‘Spin Art’ stall at the London street fair A Fête Worse than Death, organised by Joshua Compston and featuring works by Gavin Turk, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas. Hirst and Fairhurst’s stall encouraged passersby to create their own spin paintings by pouring variably coloured paint onto rapidly rotating canvases, producing a number of unique kaleidoscopic surfaces that, in their finished state, were sold for one pound each. It was only a year later that Hirst began creating Spin Paintings with the intent of growing them as a prominent branch of his infamously serial artistic practice. That year, he commissioned a scaled-up version of the machine he had used at the fair, and began to work on tondos – which now occupy the majority of the series. Calling comparisons with Jackson Pollock's infamous gestural process, Hirst’s application of paint combined with the machine’s energetic spin blurred the boundaries between genres and media. Created in 1998 as an early formulation of the series, the present work vividly embodies Hirst’s tongue-in-cheek attitude to art historical tradition through a brilliant process-based approach, lingering between painting and performance.

Enforcing his tendency to elaborate discreet rules for all his self-described ‘endless’ series of works, Hirst’s spins are often thematic and specific in designation. Like all other paintings from the series, Beautiful tropical, jungle painting (with pink snot) bears an idiosyncratically elongated title that begins with ‘Beautiful’ and ends with ‘Painting’. Composed of amorphous masses of ochre, green, red and blue that take over the surface of the canvas entirely, the composition transforms into a wondrous and vivacious explosion of colour that departs from Hirst’s usual intentness on order, repetition, and quasi-scientific formulaism. Unlike his infamous Medicine Cabinets, Spot and Kaleidoscope Paintings, Hirst’s spins are controlled solely by the motion of a machine, which he is only able to manipulate to a limited degree. They are ‘childish… in the positive sense of the word’, the artist has said (Damien Hirst, quoted in Stuart Morgan, ‘An Interview with Damien Hirst’, 1995, reproduced online). They conjure a gem or candy-like visual universe that seems to spin forevermore – even in their final state. The circular shape of the canvas furthermore brings to mind Hirst’s infamous pattern of the spot, which invades a number of his series, namely his eponymously titled body of Spot Paintings.

The result of daring spontaneity and dizzying movement, Beautiful tropical, jungle painting (with pink snot) is evocative of the movement found in Abstract Expressionist canvases, while at the same time recalling Robert Delaunay’s masterful circular compositions, which equally appear to swirl and whirl with unbridled energy. A tondo of colourful charisma enmeshing a number of striking hues, the present work boasts a comparable painterly constitution. Yet the wildness of its spin, paired with a revealingly feral title, suggests a tangible atmosphere. In this sense, one is reminded of Henri Rousseau’s The Dream, which features a nude woman reclining in flora and fauna, pried on by two wide-eyed lions. Though Rousseau’s picture entails scenic verisimilitude, and therefore contrasts with the present work’s full abstraction, its colours and suggestive angles convey a similar environment – beautifully tropical.