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Lot Essay
"A veil is a barrier, a curtain between two things, something that you can look at and pass through. It’s solid yet invisible and reveals and yet obscures the truth, the thing that we are searching for"--Damien Hirst
Spanning over nine feet in height and almost twelve feet in width, Damien Hirst’s Veil of Life Everlasting is a monumental, prismatic canvas from the artist’s celebrated series of Veils. Executed between 2017 and 2019, the paintings which comprise the Veils, and an accompanying series of works on paper, were the first of several recent series by the artist—who typically relies on a team of assistants to support his prodigious artistic output—to be painted entirely by Hirst’s hand. The Veils present an evolution of the artist’s career-long exploration of chromatics, seriality, and human mortality. They recall the Visual Candy paintings of the early 1990s, which had paid homage to Hirst’s embattled draw towards artists like Willem de Kooning and Chaïm Soutine: “my heart felt like I was into ’50s gestural painting at the time, and my head was in Minimalism and the consumer world,” he explained (D. Hirst interviewed by A. McDonald, “In The Studio: Damien Hirst’s Veil Paintings,” Gagosian Quarterly, 4 July 2020, online [accessed: 4/16/2025]). For many years the latter took precedence, exemplified in the Spot Paintings’ rigid, obsessive arrangements of random color, which had endeavored to bring order into the chaos of human existence. The Veils, which are allowed to be hung in any orientation, are inspired by Georges Seurat’s pointillist canvases and the Impressionist paintings of Claude Monet They constitute a triumphant surrender to the unfettered joy of gesture.
In Veil of Life Everlasting a confetti-like eruption of paint cascades across the surface of the work, in the series’ signature palette of magenta and carmine, verdant green, cobalt violet, assorted blues—Prussian, cerulean and ultramarine—as well as cadmium orange and red, and Naples yellow. Atop layers of color which vie and yield to one another to forge an undulating, immersive pictorial field, verdant green impasto daubs are scattered abundantly across large portions of the work’s surface. Beneath, hues of pink and orange collide with deep flashes of blue. Despite the allover effect, evocative of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, there is remarkable variety in the scale and density of each daub; some are tiny, precisely placed flecks, while others—thick and encrusted—bare the echo of a heavily laden brush. In places, excess paint falls in delicate trails across the canvas. The effect is evocative of a hazy sunset scene glimpsed through gently billowing foliage, as an intense, rosy light refracts on water and scatters into bright white flashes.
The Veils were envisioned as a limited series from their point of conception, and they respond to and inform one another. Working across many canvases simultaneously in his vast, bright London studio, Hirst would prime each in one block of color before building up layer upon layer of paint. He moved freely around the studio carrying a hand-mixed tin of paint, scattering tiny flecks across the surface of each canvas. “I have a selection of colors I love and use over and over again,” explains Hirst. “They are like sweet shop colors and the colors of fruit and flowers; they are my go-to colors” (D. Hirst, ibid). For the series, Hirst used a longer-than-normal bristle brush, about two and a half feet long. The physical space this enforced between artist and artwork allowed Hirst to maintain distance and perspective, as the mystical process of optical mixing transpired on the canvas in front of him.
The allusion to immortality in the title of the present work speaks to Hirst’s extraordinary and life-long obsession with death. The theme of mortality haunts the artist's wider oeuvre and is felt keenly in the Veils, despite their chromatic vivacity. The canvas contains a vastitude; the sublime is revealed within paint. “They are a battle with the idea of death,” explained Hirst. “The infinite series I made at the beginning of my career was a way for me to not face that. It’s a great way to imagine that you will last forever—even though you won’t ... maybe in my Spot paintings I was hiding from my own mortality” (D. Hirst, ibid). In this way, the Veils become a metaphor for life itself—which blooms with ephemeral splendor. In one sense Veil of Life Everlasting captures Hirst’s acceptance of death, his ultimate inability to broach the threshold between mortal and immortal life. Yet it simultaneously gestures towards another kind of immortality, embedded deep within the recesses of painting itself.
Spanning over nine feet in height and almost twelve feet in width, Damien Hirst’s Veil of Life Everlasting is a monumental, prismatic canvas from the artist’s celebrated series of Veils. Executed between 2017 and 2019, the paintings which comprise the Veils, and an accompanying series of works on paper, were the first of several recent series by the artist—who typically relies on a team of assistants to support his prodigious artistic output—to be painted entirely by Hirst’s hand. The Veils present an evolution of the artist’s career-long exploration of chromatics, seriality, and human mortality. They recall the Visual Candy paintings of the early 1990s, which had paid homage to Hirst’s embattled draw towards artists like Willem de Kooning and Chaïm Soutine: “my heart felt like I was into ’50s gestural painting at the time, and my head was in Minimalism and the consumer world,” he explained (D. Hirst interviewed by A. McDonald, “In The Studio: Damien Hirst’s Veil Paintings,” Gagosian Quarterly, 4 July 2020, online [accessed: 4/16/2025]). For many years the latter took precedence, exemplified in the Spot Paintings’ rigid, obsessive arrangements of random color, which had endeavored to bring order into the chaos of human existence. The Veils, which are allowed to be hung in any orientation, are inspired by Georges Seurat’s pointillist canvases and the Impressionist paintings of Claude Monet They constitute a triumphant surrender to the unfettered joy of gesture.
In Veil of Life Everlasting a confetti-like eruption of paint cascades across the surface of the work, in the series’ signature palette of magenta and carmine, verdant green, cobalt violet, assorted blues—Prussian, cerulean and ultramarine—as well as cadmium orange and red, and Naples yellow. Atop layers of color which vie and yield to one another to forge an undulating, immersive pictorial field, verdant green impasto daubs are scattered abundantly across large portions of the work’s surface. Beneath, hues of pink and orange collide with deep flashes of blue. Despite the allover effect, evocative of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, there is remarkable variety in the scale and density of each daub; some are tiny, precisely placed flecks, while others—thick and encrusted—bare the echo of a heavily laden brush. In places, excess paint falls in delicate trails across the canvas. The effect is evocative of a hazy sunset scene glimpsed through gently billowing foliage, as an intense, rosy light refracts on water and scatters into bright white flashes.
The Veils were envisioned as a limited series from their point of conception, and they respond to and inform one another. Working across many canvases simultaneously in his vast, bright London studio, Hirst would prime each in one block of color before building up layer upon layer of paint. He moved freely around the studio carrying a hand-mixed tin of paint, scattering tiny flecks across the surface of each canvas. “I have a selection of colors I love and use over and over again,” explains Hirst. “They are like sweet shop colors and the colors of fruit and flowers; they are my go-to colors” (D. Hirst, ibid). For the series, Hirst used a longer-than-normal bristle brush, about two and a half feet long. The physical space this enforced between artist and artwork allowed Hirst to maintain distance and perspective, as the mystical process of optical mixing transpired on the canvas in front of him.
The allusion to immortality in the title of the present work speaks to Hirst’s extraordinary and life-long obsession with death. The theme of mortality haunts the artist's wider oeuvre and is felt keenly in the Veils, despite their chromatic vivacity. The canvas contains a vastitude; the sublime is revealed within paint. “They are a battle with the idea of death,” explained Hirst. “The infinite series I made at the beginning of my career was a way for me to not face that. It’s a great way to imagine that you will last forever—even though you won’t ... maybe in my Spot paintings I was hiding from my own mortality” (D. Hirst, ibid). In this way, the Veils become a metaphor for life itself—which blooms with ephemeral splendor. In one sense Veil of Life Everlasting captures Hirst’s acceptance of death, his ultimate inability to broach the threshold between mortal and immortal life. Yet it simultaneously gestures towards another kind of immortality, embedded deep within the recesses of painting itself.