“[The Spin Paintings are] memorials to the death of experience – memories of fleeting moments of immediacy and intensity.”
—Andrew Wilson
Wielding household paint on a rapidly rotating canvas to create layered veils of chromatic brilliance, over the past three decades Damien Hirst has returned to his Spin Paintings to present expression in its purest form. Animating the surface through waves of forest green, lemon yellow, red, and black, as Jackson Pollock had abandoned the brush in his action paintings, in Beautiful, Timeless, Tranquility Spin Painting for Deron Hirst continues to radically unravel the formal apparatus of the art canon, asserting the primacy of gesture and material.
Appearing in various scales, shapes, colours, and mediums throughout his practice, Hirst created his first Spin Painting in 1992. Continuing the series the following year for Joshua Compston’s artist-led fair, ‘A Fete Worse than Death’, Hirst dressed as clown and sold each of the paintings with fellow artist Angus Fairhurst for £1 in a manner typical of Hirst’s irreverence and radical approach. Exhibiting at the fair alongside other pioneering young British artists like Gavin Turk, Tracey Emin, and Sarah Lucas, Hirst pursued the series with greater rigour in 1994 after he commissioned the manufacture of a spin machine while living in Berlin.
Engaging with nostalgia, the mechanical, and the role of movement in art, Hirst’s Spin Paintings have emerged among the most significant bodies of work in his corpus. His childhood was fundamental to the series’ production, as Hirst candidly explained John Noakes’ demonstration on Blue Peter in 1975 had inspired the Spin method. Though he initially reflected, ‘I never thought it was real art. I remember thinking: 'That's fun, whereas art is something more serious’, Hirst embraces the child-like creative potential of the Spin Painting that speaks with equal fluency against traditional art conventions.i Using playful titles and vivid contrast, as in Beautiful, Timeless, Tranquility Spin Painting for Deron, the intensity, element of chance and inherent movement juxtaposes with the formal rigidity of his Spot Paintings or the gravitas of his medicine or formaldehyde cabinets. Like the Rotoreliefs of Marcel Duchamp eighty years earlier, Hirst uses the motor as a mode to elicit inspiration and wonder alongside energy and action. In the words of Mario Codognato, ‘the Spin Paintings gather and amalgamate the individuality of every individual colour, introducing a mechanical rotating movement at the moment of execution […] to become pure expression of the basic and vital gesture of painting and its mythology’.ii In Beautiful, Timeless, Tranquility Spin Painting for Deron Hirst therefore obliterates through expression, enacting a novel visual language liberated from formal frameworks.
