Damien Hirst - Contemporary Art London Thursday, June 21, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Gagosian Gallery, New York

  • Catalogue Essay

    From his pharmacies and dots to his butterflies and Spin Paintings, Damien Hirst’s constant engagement with nature and death is a predominant element in his works’ executions. With its monumental scale and colorful explosion of paint, Beautiful Like a Rainbow Gone Wrong Painting from 2005 is an exquisite work from the Spin Painting series, highlighting Hirst’s technical, stylistic and artistic diversity.

    Adopting Michael Angelo’s shape of the tondo and turning towards elements of Abstract Expressionism, such as the Pollockian idea of the ‘accident’, this work with its kaleidoscopic effects is impulsive and mesmerizing. Ambiguous and questionable perhaps, Hirst’s hand never touches the surface of the canvas – a conscious decision made by the artist, allowing for nature, or as it has been referred to, the centrifugal force to take it course. The result – a colour blast of different shades of greens, reds, yellows, whites and blues issuing the painting with a ‘Richteresque’ effect, reminiscent of his colourful abstract works.

    Although the work is referred to as abstract in form, Beautiful Like a Rainbow Gone Wrong Painting is a forceful work capturing the effects of the spin, whilst uniquely maintaining circular forms. Similar to concentric circles, the shapes provide the painting with depth, which strengthens its visual intensity and ‘wonder-land’ aesthetic

  • 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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Beautiful Like a Rainbow Gone Wrong Painting

2005
Gloss household paint on canvas.
Diameter: 84 in. (213.4 cm).

Estimate
£250,000 - 350,000 

Sold for £378,400

Contemporary Art

22 June 2007, 4pm & 5pm
London