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Lot Essay
Damien Hirst’s spot paintings are some of the most recognisable works in modern art. Alongside his sculptures and installations, they helped to define the era of the Young British Artists, sparking controversy and acclaim in equal measure. Each painting’s title is taken from the 1990 Sigma-Aldrich Catalogue of Chemical Compounds, and together—like much of Hirst’s work—they form a vast inquiry into the relationship between art, science and belief. Their pristine, grid-based facture embodies an urge to categorise and control that is undermined by their endless visual multiplicity. Since their inception four decades ago, the spots have appeared in sizes from half a millimetre to three feet across, and on canvases from mural-scale to miniature. With some exceptions, each follows the same set of principles: the spots are hand-painted in household gloss on canvas; no spot is precisely the same shade as any other within the work; and the gap between each spot is equal to the width of the spots themselves.
The spot paintings are grouped according to distinct types of drugs, with subseries governed by different formal rules. The ‘Radioactive Compounds’, for example, have fluorescent spots, the ‘Venoms’ pale pastel hues, and the ‘Sedatives’ white spots on gold-edged white canvases. The most extensive group are the ‘Pharmaceuticals’, begun in 1986 while Hirst was still a student at Goldsmiths, and referring to compounds manufactured for use as medicinal drugs. Almost all on white backgrounds, the spots in these works are made up of a random and infinite colour series, each one of which is unique within a single painting. Aconiazide (1992), an impressive large-scale ‘Pharmaceutical’ canvas with four-inch spots, takes its title from an anti-tuberculosis medication. The painting pulses and oscillates as the eye attempts to grasp a pattern from the grid, or hones in on one spot’s particular hue.
Aconiazide dates from a breakthrough year for Hirst. In March 1992, the first of Charles Saatchi’s ‘Young British Artists’ group shows opened at his gallery on Boundary Road, where Hirst exhibited his now legendary works A Thousand Years (1990) and The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991). The acronym ‘YBA’ would soon enter the curatorial lexicon. That November, Hirst was shortlisted for the Turner Prize. At the end of the year, he debuted his room-sized Pharmacy (1992)—today in the collection of the Tate—at Cohen Gallery in New York. Like his earlier medicine cabinets, this installation’s rows of packaged drugs related closely to the spot paintings’ formal purism and therapeutic themes. ‘Art is like medicine—it can heal,’ Hirst has said. ‘Yet I’ve always been amazed at how many people believe in medicine but don’t believe in art, without questioning either’ (‘On Dumb Painting’, in Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, London, 2013, p. Ab).
Bromphenol Red (2007), meanwhile, is a unique rarity among the spot paintings: it is the sole example in the entire series to be painted on a red background. Hirst made this work especially for the (RED) Auction, a charity event in aid of the United Nations Foundation to support HIV/Aids relief programmes in Africa, which he co-organised in 2008. It belongs to the subseries of ‘Carbon-13 Labelled Compounds’, the rest of which are painted on black-primed canvases. The brightly-coloured spots are applied in the same manner as in the ‘Pharmaceutical’ paintings. Labelled compounds are substances prepared as biological tracers or as intermediates for the synthesis of other compounds: Bromophenol Red is commonly used as a pH indicator.
Hirst has observed an uneasy tension between the spots’ randomised palettes and their compositional order. ‘There are no chords of colour in these paintings: you’re left at sea with them’ (in conversation with A. Temkin, in Contemporary Voices: Works from the UBS Art Collection, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2005, p. 61). At the same time—and in contrast to the more macabre motifs seen elsewhere in his work—the spot paintings can be seen as joyful hymns to the infinity of colour itself, alive with a sense of wonder at the chaos and complexity of a world that is ultimately beyond our grasp. ‘I was always a colourist,’ Hirst has said: ‘… that’s what the spot paintings came from—to create that structure to do those colours ... Mathematically, with the spot paintings, I probably discovered the most fundamentally important thing in any kind of art. Which is the harmony of where colour can exist on its own, interacting with other colours in a perfect format’ (quoted in D. Hirst and G. Burn, On the Way to Work, London, 2001, pp. 119-120).
The spot paintings are grouped according to distinct types of drugs, with subseries governed by different formal rules. The ‘Radioactive Compounds’, for example, have fluorescent spots, the ‘Venoms’ pale pastel hues, and the ‘Sedatives’ white spots on gold-edged white canvases. The most extensive group are the ‘Pharmaceuticals’, begun in 1986 while Hirst was still a student at Goldsmiths, and referring to compounds manufactured for use as medicinal drugs. Almost all on white backgrounds, the spots in these works are made up of a random and infinite colour series, each one of which is unique within a single painting. Aconiazide (1992), an impressive large-scale ‘Pharmaceutical’ canvas with four-inch spots, takes its title from an anti-tuberculosis medication. The painting pulses and oscillates as the eye attempts to grasp a pattern from the grid, or hones in on one spot’s particular hue.
Aconiazide dates from a breakthrough year for Hirst. In March 1992, the first of Charles Saatchi’s ‘Young British Artists’ group shows opened at his gallery on Boundary Road, where Hirst exhibited his now legendary works A Thousand Years (1990) and The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991). The acronym ‘YBA’ would soon enter the curatorial lexicon. That November, Hirst was shortlisted for the Turner Prize. At the end of the year, he debuted his room-sized Pharmacy (1992)—today in the collection of the Tate—at Cohen Gallery in New York. Like his earlier medicine cabinets, this installation’s rows of packaged drugs related closely to the spot paintings’ formal purism and therapeutic themes. ‘Art is like medicine—it can heal,’ Hirst has said. ‘Yet I’ve always been amazed at how many people believe in medicine but don’t believe in art, without questioning either’ (‘On Dumb Painting’, in Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, London, 2013, p. Ab).
Bromphenol Red (2007), meanwhile, is a unique rarity among the spot paintings: it is the sole example in the entire series to be painted on a red background. Hirst made this work especially for the (RED) Auction, a charity event in aid of the United Nations Foundation to support HIV/Aids relief programmes in Africa, which he co-organised in 2008. It belongs to the subseries of ‘Carbon-13 Labelled Compounds’, the rest of which are painted on black-primed canvases. The brightly-coloured spots are applied in the same manner as in the ‘Pharmaceutical’ paintings. Labelled compounds are substances prepared as biological tracers or as intermediates for the synthesis of other compounds: Bromophenol Red is commonly used as a pH indicator.
Hirst has observed an uneasy tension between the spots’ randomised palettes and their compositional order. ‘There are no chords of colour in these paintings: you’re left at sea with them’ (in conversation with A. Temkin, in Contemporary Voices: Works from the UBS Art Collection, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2005, p. 61). At the same time—and in contrast to the more macabre motifs seen elsewhere in his work—the spot paintings can be seen as joyful hymns to the infinity of colour itself, alive with a sense of wonder at the chaos and complexity of a world that is ultimately beyond our grasp. ‘I was always a colourist,’ Hirst has said: ‘… that’s what the spot paintings came from—to create that structure to do those colours ... Mathematically, with the spot paintings, I probably discovered the most fundamentally important thing in any kind of art. Which is the harmony of where colour can exist on its own, interacting with other colours in a perfect format’ (quoted in D. Hirst and G. Burn, On the Way to Work, London, 2001, pp. 119-120).