.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Thiosalicyclic Acid is a photorealist painting of one of the artist's spot-paintings hanging alongside a photographer's colour-chart that Damien Hirst made between 2004 and 2005 for his Elusive Truth exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in New York in March 2005. A variant on Hirst's ongoing series known as the 'Pharmaceutical Paintings' Thiosalicyclic Acid takes its name from the chemical that forms the basis of a treatment for skin cancer.
Hirst has described his 'Pharmaceutical Paintings' as being 'perfectly dumb paintings, which feel absolutely right'. Based on a simple system that allows him to indulge his love of colour without answering to any outside influence or ideology the 'Pharmaceutical Paintings' operate as 'visual candy' offering an alternative medicine to that proffered by the drug companies. 'I started them as an endless series,' Hirst has said, 'a scientific approach to painting in a similar way to the drug companies' scientific approach to life' (D. Hirst, I want to spent the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always forever now. London 1997, p. 246.). The basis of these 'spot' paintings is that they are created mechanically and systematically in a manner beyond aesthetics. The grid-like structure as Hirst has explained,'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. The end of painting. And I'm still painting.'(Ibid)
In Thiosalicyclic Acid Hirst deliberately referenced this arbitrary nature of the Pharmaceutical Paintings and developed it in accordance with his new photorealist paintings of other subjects into a painting that also explores a relationship that some commentators had already seen between Hirst's work and Gerhard Richter's Colour Charts. Richter's 1960s painted copies of industrial paint manufacturers' colour charts were not only an extension of the artist's Pop art sensibility into the realm of the abstract but also an iconoclastic strategy for painting that asserted his aim of creating an anti-ideological art. Thiosalicyclic Acid follows Richter and Warhol's strategy of appropriating their own art as a subject by being a self-reflective painting which, like Richter's later Auschnitt paintings for example, depicts a photographic image of one of Hirst's own paintings. It also, by directly comparing this painted painting with a painted photographic copy of a photographer's colour chart, directly relates this work to the process of reproduction by which all art is photographed recorded and reproduced today. In this, Hirst has created a work that logically extends the original purpose of his spot paintings into the wider context of his established place a leading art-world figure and businessman while also encouraging further debate about the nature of representation and the art object. In this way, as a photorealist but also essentially abstract work, Thiosalicyclic Acid, as its name suggests, is a variant on the original Pharmaceutical paintings that further explores the 'elusive truth' about what representation actually is.
Hirst has described his 'Pharmaceutical Paintings' as being 'perfectly dumb paintings, which feel absolutely right'. Based on a simple system that allows him to indulge his love of colour without answering to any outside influence or ideology the 'Pharmaceutical Paintings' operate as 'visual candy' offering an alternative medicine to that proffered by the drug companies. 'I started them as an endless series,' Hirst has said, 'a scientific approach to painting in a similar way to the drug companies' scientific approach to life' (D. Hirst, I want to spent the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always forever now. London 1997, p. 246.). The basis of these 'spot' paintings is that they are created mechanically and systematically in a manner beyond aesthetics. The grid-like structure as Hirst has explained,'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. The end of painting. And I'm still painting.'(Ibid)
In Thiosalicyclic Acid Hirst deliberately referenced this arbitrary nature of the Pharmaceutical Paintings and developed it in accordance with his new photorealist paintings of other subjects into a painting that also explores a relationship that some commentators had already seen between Hirst's work and Gerhard Richter's Colour Charts. Richter's 1960s painted copies of industrial paint manufacturers' colour charts were not only an extension of the artist's Pop art sensibility into the realm of the abstract but also an iconoclastic strategy for painting that asserted his aim of creating an anti-ideological art. Thiosalicyclic Acid follows Richter and Warhol's strategy of appropriating their own art as a subject by being a self-reflective painting which, like Richter's later Auschnitt paintings for example, depicts a photographic image of one of Hirst's own paintings. It also, by directly comparing this painted painting with a painted photographic copy of a photographer's colour chart, directly relates this work to the process of reproduction by which all art is photographed recorded and reproduced today. In this, Hirst has created a work that logically extends the original purpose of his spot paintings into the wider context of his established place a leading art-world figure and businessman while also encouraging further debate about the nature of representation and the art object. In this way, as a photorealist but also essentially abstract work, Thiosalicyclic Acid, as its name suggests, is a variant on the original Pharmaceutical paintings that further explores the 'elusive truth' about what representation actually is.