Lot Essay
Hirst began making prints in earnest in the mid-1990s, and his collaboration with Paragon Press has been among the most sustained of his career. The editioned work is not an adjunct to the paintings and sculpture but a parallel strand of his practice, and 40 Woodcut Spots represents his most ambitious undertaking in the woodcut medium: forty individual compositions conceived as a single project, together forming an extended study of the motif with which he is most closely identified.
The spot has been central to Hirst’s work since 1988, when the first Pharmaceutical Paintings appeared at Freeze, the exhibition he curated as a student at Goldsmiths. Their grids of unrepeated colours refer to the ordered promise of pharmaceuticals, and to the tension between science, belief, and mortality that underlies much of his output. Each print in the present set takes its title from a chemical compound, carrying that pharmaceutical logic into the prints themselves.
The choice of woodcut is a considered one. Translating an ostensibly mechanical motif into the oldest of print media gives the spots a warmth of surface and minute variations of inking that the paintings deliberately suppress. Across the forty sheets, which vary in scale, format, and palette, the series demonstrates a considerable compositional range within a deliberately narrow formula. Most sets have long since been dispersed, and complete examples are rarely seen on the market.
The spot has been central to Hirst’s work since 1988, when the first Pharmaceutical Paintings appeared at Freeze, the exhibition he curated as a student at Goldsmiths. Their grids of unrepeated colours refer to the ordered promise of pharmaceuticals, and to the tension between science, belief, and mortality that underlies much of his output. Each print in the present set takes its title from a chemical compound, carrying that pharmaceutical logic into the prints themselves.
The choice of woodcut is a considered one. Translating an ostensibly mechanical motif into the oldest of print media gives the spots a warmth of surface and minute variations of inking that the paintings deliberately suppress. Across the forty sheets, which vary in scale, format, and palette, the series demonstrates a considerable compositional range within a deliberately narrow formula. Most sets have long since been dispersed, and complete examples are rarely seen on the market.