Artist Review: Damien Hirst – The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011

Author: Alizey Khan

Damien Hirst
Phe-Tyr, 2004–11
Household gloss on canvas
140 x 156 inches (355.6 x 396.2 cm)
Photo: gagosian.com © Damien Hirst/ Science Ltd, 2012 Photography Prudence Cuming Associates

Few contemporary artists are capable of generating as much notoriety, attention and media controversy in the art world as Damien Hirst, who is best known for his assemblages featuring dead animals, pills, and jewel-encrusted skulls. Much controversy surrounds the commercial, mass produced, overindulgent aspect of his art; his works regularly sell for millions, and his latest exhibition of spot paintings spanning each of the Gagosian Gallery’s eleven locations worldwide was largely produced by a team of assistants working on a production line.

The paintings follow a strict formula of assistant-selected multicoloured spots of a uniform size arranged in a grid against an off-white or white ground, with each circle spaced one circle’s diameter away from the next, and no repeating colours within a canvas. The sheer ubiquity of the pieces in this exhibition and the media controversy surrounding them serve to reinforce the brand Hirst has carefully created over the past twenty-five years through his social cultivation of influential buyers such as Charles Saatchi and Lawrence Gagosian himself.


Installation view
Photo: Zarko Vijatovic @ gagosian.com © Damien Hirst/ Science Ltd, 2012 Photography Prudence Cuming Associates

Hirst’s mass-produced spot paintings serve as a lifeless status symbol for the staggeringly wealthy patrons and corporations who purchase them, while Hirst himself has stated to the media that he refuses to create the works himself because he “can’t be bothered,” further removing the artist himself from the work emotionally and reinforcing the spot motif as merely an icon—an extended logo for Hirst’s brand of artistry.

Damien Hirst
Zinc Sulfate
2008
gagosian.com © Damien Hirst/ Science Ltd, 2012 Photography Prudence Cuming Associates

Hirst’s exhibition, “The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011” forms a retrospective of the spot paintings he began to produce as a student in 1986, when he would paint the spots directly onto walls. Some of the paintings, such as “Zinc Sulfate,” follow a circular grid pattern in lieu of the rectangle or square, while others, such as “8-Bromoguanine” feature 4 large spots in lieu of the vast abundance of spots present in many of the works; each piece in the exhibition is named for a chemical, alluding to the prevalence of recreational drug use in society while simultaneously casting the paintings themselves as a form of drug purchased by collectors for their own satisfaction.

The uniformity of spacing between each spot lends the series of  paintings a similar uniformity, regardless of the size of the dots or the canvas; there are three hundred and thirty one paintings in the exhibition worldwide, varying in size, and the multiplicity in their numbers guide the viewer to accept each work as a mere part of an expansive whole.

Damien Hirst
8-Bromoguanine, 2005
Household gloss on canvas
54 x 54 inches (137.2 x 137.2 cm)
gagosian.com © Damien Hirst/ Science Ltd, 2012 Photography Prudence Cuming Associates

Hirst is well aware of his elevated status as an artist, and uses his unique vantage point to provide a veiled social commentary regarding those who use his work as status symbols; as critic Peter Schjeldahl of the New Yorker states, Hirst, through the premium prices he sets on his work and the manner in which he broadcasts both the art and its value to the media, “honestly vivifies a situation in which the power of money celebrates itself by shedding all pretext of supporting illiquid values.”

In fact, much of the work on exhibition has been donated temporarily by wealthy collectors who continue to purchase his work, certainly cementing his future art historical position as a “peculiarly cold-blooded pet of millennial excess wealth.” Schjeldahl does concede that “nothing that Hirst does lacks an art-historical pedigree,” recognizing the influences of Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, Jeff Koons, Surrealism and Minimalism in his work, although Hirst’s interpretation of abstraction “smacks less of museums than of art-school textbooks.”

Kazimir Malevich
The First Textile Design with Suprematist Ornament
1919

The context behind this work lies in art history and the art world itself, combining “the sum of their associations in the history of abstraction” to create work that is both instantly recognizable as his and universally appealing—in short, to create a brand. Schjehldahl cynically refers to Hirst’s various series of work as “product lines” that are “churned out by proxy and then bid up at auction as fungible commodities,” disparaging the blatant retail consumer value of the work, as it is not designed for any lofty aesthetic purpose beyond the purely decorative. Indeed, through the uniformity and repetitious nature of his spot paintings, Hirst has created a recognizable, commercial, universally appealing brand, a product of guaranteed quality that attracts the wealthiest, least aesthetically inclined collectors, while sneering at those very collectors for their excess as well as those who would presume to decry the work for its derivative mediocrity—as Schjehldahl puts it, “flipping the bird to anyone who naively craves more and better from art”.

Damien Hirst
Ethyl Laurate, 2003
Household gloss on canvas
59 x 59 inches (149.9 x 149.9 cm)
gagosian.com © Damien Hirst/ Science Ltd, 2012 Photography Prudence Cuming Associates

The exaggerated abundance of the simple spot motif, the artist’s unwillingness to create more than five of them himself, and each painting’s corresponding price tag, suggest that the artist himself is cynical about the art market and the compulsions of wealthy collectors; it seems almost wrong to search for any beauty or significance in the work, as “to like them would entail identifying with the artist’s cynicism.” According to Schjeldahl, the uniformly distributed spots have a “deliberate deadness” reminiscent of Hirst’s earlier sculptures of animals embalmed in formaldehyde; however, the randomly selected colours of the spots themselves do lend them a resonance beyond their placement, as bolder colours stand out alongside the receding pastels.

Hirst allowed his assistants to choose the palette and placement of colours for each painting, and while Hirst’s formula mandates that each spot is a different shade, some are filled with stronger concentrations within a particular hue—“Cupric Nitrate,” for example, is filled with an abundance of yellow and orange tones that seem to form a vibrating optical pattern within the darker, more neutral colours surrounding them.

Damien Hirst
Cupric Nitrate, 2007
Household gloss on canvas
81 x 83 inches (205.7 x 210.8 cm)
gagosian.com © Damien Hirst/ Science Ltd, 2012 Photography Prudence Cuming Associates

Hirst’s work, with its references to art historical works by pop artists such as Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and the fundamental minimalist geometries of Kasemir Malevich, violates several of Clement Greenberg’s staunch ideals regarding the “purity” of Modernism, as Hirst unabashedly borrows from ideas of abstraction that came before him. Hirst’s spot paintings share the deliberate use of mass production as well as the repetitive use of iconography used by artists such as Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol.

Andy Warhol
210 Coca-Cola Bottles
Screen print, 1962

The close-range repetition of the circle and grid is reminiscent of Warhol’s use of repetition to desensitize the viewer to the image presented; each of Hirst’s spots do not stand as individuals, despite the individuality of each colour on each canvas, and, indeed, even the paintings themselves do not stand as individuals, as their very abundance and pattern-like regularity causes each one to dissolve into a simple piece of the whole—the Hirst “spot painting” brand—recently expanded to include spot-printed scarves, cufflinks and ties. Corporate consumerism is as valid an issue today as it was in the 1960s, and much like Warhol himself, Hirst leaves the process of creation to his assistants and places more emphasis on his intellectual property, the marketing of his work, and his artistic persona. Like Warhol, Hirst favours mechanical precision over painterly prowess, and this precision allows him to give assistants specific directions and always produce the intended result.

Jasper Johns
Target, 1958
oil and collage on canvas
91.44 x 91.44 cm (36 x 36 in.)
Collection of the Artist.
© Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

The spot paintings are produced in enamel gloss paint, a medium already present in every household, alluding to Hirst’s desire to make art aesthetically accessible to everyone regardless of their prior interaction with works of art, as well as Warhol’s desire for everyone to be able to experience his screen prints in an equitable way. The use of recurring iconography in the form of the grid of flat circles is reminiscent of Jasper Johns’ dedication to the two dimensional target and flag motifs; however, Johns’ paintings are thickly textured with encaustic, while the household enamel is smooth and flat against the solid white ground. Johns depicted flat objects in his paintings to create a continuously shifting interplay between the object as an object and as a painting; Hirst, however, views them not only as purely objects to be mass produced, but as commodities to be sold on a grand scale. Each spot painting is not, in itself, a painting; it is only in the context of the prolific nature of the series as a whole that each piece holds value and meaning, a reality that becomes cheapened when collectors buy each painting on an individual basis.

Installation view
gagosian.com © Damien Hirst/ Science Ltd, 2012 Photography Prudence Cuming Associates

Damien Hirst is the foremost modern example of the artist as businessman, an archetype that has existed since the dawn of the art market; a career-minded artist is more likely to produce and market decorative work with widespread appeal that does not necessarily communicate any ideas beyond the image itself, and Hirst has always been a master at marketing and selling his own work, having risen to fame after curating and organizing the “Freeze” exhibition featuring his own work—including the earliest spot paintings—as well as the work those who would go on to exemplify the Young British Artists movement of the late 1980s and 1990s.

Damien Hirst
Eucatropine
2005
gagosian.com © Damien Hirst/ Science Ltd, 2012 Photography Prudence Cuming Associates

This monumental retrospective of his spot paintings, which he had threatened to stop producing three years ago, is perhaps born out of a weary cynicism regarding the preferred taste of his wealthy patrons who are only concerned with increasing their own status through ownership of a work in the series. Without a doubt, this exhibition has cemented his iconography worldwide and connected it indelibly to his name; in the United Kingdom, multicoloured gridded dots have not only become synonymous with Damien Hirst’s work, but with that of British contemporary art as a whole. In London, it is common to see a taxi or umbrella wholly emblazoned with Hirst’s spot motif. In this sense, he has reduced painting to a logo, abstracting the very nature of art rather than simply visually abstracting the work itself.