Lot Essay
Damien Hirst explains the motivation behind this picture:
"I often get asked about the spot paintings - 'I love your work but why do you do those stupid spots? They're not good paintings' or 'the paintings are great/better than your other works, but Richter already did it'. They have nothing to do with Richter or Poons or Bridget Riley or Albers or even Op. They're about the urge or the need to be a painter above and beyond the object of a painting. I've often said they are like sculptures of paintings.
I started them as an endless series like a sculptural idea of a painter (myself). A scientific approach to painting in a similar way to the drug companies' scientific approach to life. Art doesn't purport to have all the answers; the drug companies do. Hence the title of the series, The Pharmaceutical Paintings, and the individual titles of the paintings themselves: Acetaldehyde (1991), Albumin Human Glycated (1992), Androstanolone (1993), Arabinitol (1994) etc.
Art is like medicine - it can heal. Yet I've always been amazed at how many people believe in medicine but don't believe in art, without questioning either.
...In the spot paintings the grid-like structure creates the beginning of a system. On each painting no two colours are the same. This ends the system; it's a simple system. No matter how I feel as an artist or a painter, the paintings end up looking happy. I can still make all the emotional decisions about colour that I need to as an artist, but in the end they are lost...But it is very important that there is an endless series or enough to imply an endless series.
...I once said that the spot paintings could be what art looks like viewed through an imaginary microscope. I love the fact that in the paintings the angst is removed. I have also said that I once took pills when I was a child thinking they were sweets, and several reviewers picked up on this as a reason for the pharmaceutical paintings. 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. We are used to picking out chords of the same colour and balancing them with different chords of other colours to create meaning. This can't happen. So 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. The horror underlying everything. The horror that can overwhelm everything at any moment.
...I said before that I wish I'd never said anything about The Pharmaceutical Paintings, and I still wish I hadn't. They are what they are, perfectly dumb paintings, which feel absolutely right" (Damien Hirst, op. cit, p. 246).
"I often get asked about the spot paintings - 'I love your work but why do you do those stupid spots? They're not good paintings' or 'the paintings are great/better than your other works, but Richter already did it'. They have nothing to do with Richter or Poons or Bridget Riley or Albers or even Op. They're about the urge or the need to be a painter above and beyond the object of a painting. I've often said they are like sculptures of paintings.
I started them as an endless series like a sculptural idea of a painter (myself). A scientific approach to painting in a similar way to the drug companies' scientific approach to life. Art doesn't purport to have all the answers; the drug companies do. Hence the title of the series, The Pharmaceutical Paintings, and the individual titles of the paintings themselves: Acetaldehyde (1991), Albumin Human Glycated (1992), Androstanolone (1993), Arabinitol (1994) etc.
Art is like medicine - it can heal. Yet I've always been amazed at how many people believe in medicine but don't believe in art, without questioning either.
...In the spot paintings the grid-like structure creates the beginning of a system. On each painting no two colours are the same. This ends the system; it's a simple system. No matter how I feel as an artist or a painter, the paintings end up looking happy. I can still make all the emotional decisions about colour that I need to as an artist, but in the end they are lost...But it is very important that there is an endless series or enough to imply an endless series.
...I once said that the spot paintings could be what art looks like viewed through an imaginary microscope. I love the fact that in the paintings the angst is removed. I have also said that I once took pills when I was a child thinking they were sweets, and several reviewers picked up on this as a reason for the pharmaceutical paintings. 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. We are used to picking out chords of the same colour and balancing them with different chords of other colours to create meaning. This can't happen. So 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. The horror underlying everything. The horror that can overwhelm everything at any moment.
...I said before that I wish I'd never said anything about The Pharmaceutical Paintings, and I still wish I hadn't. They are what they are, perfectly dumb paintings, which feel absolutely right" (Damien Hirst, op. cit, p. 246).