'I was always a colourist. I’ve always had a phenomenal love of colour […] So that’s where the Spot paintings came from. It was just a way of pinning down the joy of colour.' —Damien HirstCombining the tondo format of the Spin Paintings with the methodical application of precisely formed dots that characterise the iconic Spot Paintings, Zinc Sulphide is a mesmerising example of one of Damien Hirst’s most important and instantly recognisable series. Spanning over a quarter of a century, Hirst’s Spot Paintings have become synonymous with the artist himself, and have proven to be a remarkably versatile motif, given its strict limitations. Breaking with the more familiar grid-like arrangement of spots along strict vertical and horizontal lines, Zinc Sulphide presents the multichromatic spots in a series of concentric circles, radiating out from a central, butter-yellow dot. Meticulously organised, the crisply rendered dots come vividly alive within this tight circular format, exaggerating the optical interplay that is so characteristic of this celebrated series of works.

A sophisticated presentation of the artist’s abiding interest in colour and its organisation, Zinc Sulphide strikes a balance between art and science that has proven to be an abiding conceptual touchstone for Hirst’s practice. Its title appropriately referencing the inorganic compound most commonly used to create pigments and luminescent materials.

 

Early Spots

 

Absolutely foundational to Hirst’s oeuvre, the first spots were painted directly onto the Surrey Docks warehouse wall in the final phase of the now legendary Freeze exhibition curated by Hirst when he was an undergraduate student at Goldsmiths in 1988. Deeply revealing to the conceptual currents that run across Hirst’s entire oeuvre, the artist described this seminal show in terms not so far removed from the Spot Paintings themselves explaining: ‘I found I could work with already organised elements. And I suppose in Freeze the artists were kind of already organised elements in themselves and I arranged them.’ⁱ As with his slightly earlier Medicine Cabinets, Hirst found that setting himself certain limitations – the organising framework of the grid or glass-fronted cabinet; the size and colour of his forms; the number of spots or pills included in each work – generated an infinite variability.
'The grid-like structure creates the beginning of a system. On each painting no two colours are the same. This ends the system.' —Damien Hirst

Touching on a legacy of 20th century avant-garde practice that employed chance and randomisation as formative compositional tools, alongside these judiciously maintained limitations Hirst introduced an element of chance into his practice. In the case of the suite of twelve medicine cabinets that Hirst presented for his degree show in 1988, he assigned tracks from the 1977 Sex Pistols album as titles. Stumbling across the catalogue of chemical company Sigma- Aldrich’s ‘Biochemicals for Research and Diagnostic Reagents’, Hirst expanded this principle by assigning titles for works at random, treating the catalogue as a vast and random title-generator perfectly attuned to his vision for the possibly infinite variety of the Pharmaceutical Paintings.

Rendered in uniquely mixed hues of household paint no two spots of the same colour appear on any one canvas, with remarkably versatile results. As Hirst quickly discovered with one of the first spot painting’s inclusion of a black dot, the colours possessed a remarkable mutability when placed next to one another, some appearing to recede while others jumped forwards in a manner that references Bridget Riley and Larry Poon’s foundational Op Art experiments of the 1960s.

 

Meticulously spaced so that the gap between each spot is identical to the spot itself, the pattern of Zinc Sulphide achieves the remarkable effect of refusing to resolve. As Michael Bracewell describes, drawn to ‘the warmer-coloured spots, the gaze then encounters seeming sudden diagonals, verticals or broken lines of semi-coherence; look again, and even these fleeting spooks of visual sense turn out to be illusions.’ⁱⁱ Yet, despite this energetic activity, the work achieves an incredible compositional balance and harmony rooted in the methodical, scientific approach to the composition based on a philosophy of chromatic relationships and their manipulation. Despite our attempts to resolve the spots that seems to float and vibrate against one another, our eye struggles to reconcile the tensions established between the colours, a deliberate strategy of the artist who explains: ‘If you look closely at any one of these paintings a strange thing happens; because of the lack of repeated colours there is no harmony... in every painting there is a subliminal sense of unease; yet the colours project so much joy it's hard to feel it, but it's there.’ⁱⁱⁱ

 

Collector’s Digest

 

•    Coming to prominence in the late 1980s as part of the group identified by collector and gallerist Charles Saatchi as a generation of ‘Young British Artists’, Damien Hirst is best known for his boundary-pushing sculptures of animals submerged in formaldehyde, his series of medicine cabinets, and his celebrated Spot Paintings.

 

•    Since 1998 when the artist curated his seminal Freeze exhibition including work from his Goldsmith’s peer group, Hirst has continued to exhibit internationally, with major shows at Tate Modern in London and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Examples of his work can be found in major institutions including the Tate, London; the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; The Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

 

•    Most recently, Hirst’s Spot Paintings have been reimagined once again with his series of Veil Paintings, a looser, more gestural treatment of the motif that nevertheless still adheres to the same basic principles of the foundational series as an investigation into chromatic behaviour. 

ⁱ Damien Hirst, quoted in Damien Hirst and Gordon Burn, On the Way to Work, London, 2001, p. 124. 
ⁱⁱ Michael Bracewell, ‘Art Without the Angst’, in Jason Beard and Millicent Willner, ed., Damien Hirst, The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011, London, 2013, n.p. 
ⁱⁱⁱ Damien Hirst (I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, London, 1997, p. 246).