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Lot Essay
Held for twenty years in the celebrated collection of Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson, Abrus Toxin is a rare early spot painting by Damien Hirst. Thirty-five individually-coloured dots quiver in an immaculate grid, spanning a chromatic spectrum that ranges from deep black, purple and forest green to luminous pastel tones of yellow, rose and peach. Executed in 1991, it is the twenty-second work listed in the catalogue raisonné of spot paintings, and marks the moment that the series began to accelerate in earnest. The work belongs to the iconic sub-group of so-called Pharmaceutical Paintings, named after chemical compounds. These works form a major strand of Hirst’s practice, which for four decades has interrogated the relationship between art and science. Just as medicine seeks to derive structure and order from chaos, the present work juxtaposes the molecular rigour of the grid with a joyful, seemingly random distribution of colour, revelling in the frictions and frissons that emerge in the process.
Hirst made his first spot painting as a student at Goldsmiths in 1986, but it was not until the early 1990s that the series truly took flight. While much of his early oeuvre comprised dark, conceptual meditations on life and death—1991 saw his landmark installation In and Out of Love—the spot paintings allowed him to explore his painterly aspirations. ‘I was always a colourist,’ he has explained, ‘… I just move colour around on its own. So 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 ... The spot paintings are... just like, a very exciting discovery, where you get this scientific formula that you add to this sort of mess’ (D. Hirst, quoted in D. Hirst and G. Burn, On the Way to Work, London 2001, pp. 119-120 and 126).
Characterised by their equal-sized and equally-spaced dots positioned on a white background, the Pharmaceutical Paintings were titled after compounds listed in a catalogue by the chemical company Sigma-Aldrich: Biochemicals and Organic Compounds for Research and Diagnostic Reagents. The series evolved, Hirst explained, as ‘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’ (D. Hirst, I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, With Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, London 1997, p. 246). Hirst would explore this idea through various media: from his medicine and pill cabinets—transforming prescription drugs into spectacles of near-Minimalist beauty—to his animal carcasses preserved in formaldehyde. Collectively these works sought to posit art as a healing, life-giving force: one capable of matching and even transcending the solutions provided by science. In the spot paintings, this belief is channelled through the medium of colour, each work a hymn to its limitless generative power.
Hirst made his first spot painting as a student at Goldsmiths in 1986, but it was not until the early 1990s that the series truly took flight. While much of his early oeuvre comprised dark, conceptual meditations on life and death—1991 saw his landmark installation In and Out of Love—the spot paintings allowed him to explore his painterly aspirations. ‘I was always a colourist,’ he has explained, ‘… I just move colour around on its own. So 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 ... The spot paintings are... just like, a very exciting discovery, where you get this scientific formula that you add to this sort of mess’ (D. Hirst, quoted in D. Hirst and G. Burn, On the Way to Work, London 2001, pp. 119-120 and 126).
Characterised by their equal-sized and equally-spaced dots positioned on a white background, the Pharmaceutical Paintings were titled after compounds listed in a catalogue by the chemical company Sigma-Aldrich: Biochemicals and Organic Compounds for Research and Diagnostic Reagents. The series evolved, Hirst explained, as ‘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’ (D. Hirst, I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, With Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, London 1997, p. 246). Hirst would explore this idea through various media: from his medicine and pill cabinets—transforming prescription drugs into spectacles of near-Minimalist beauty—to his animal carcasses preserved in formaldehyde. Collectively these works sought to posit art as a healing, life-giving force: one capable of matching and even transcending the solutions provided by science. In the spot paintings, this belief is channelled through the medium of colour, each work a hymn to its limitless generative power.