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Lot Essay
"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; its 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" (D. Hirst quoted in D. Hirst, i want to spend the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always, forever, now, London, 1997, p. 246).
While the appearance of Notechis Ater Humphreysi, painted in 2000, bears out Hirst's claim to some form of happy Minimalism, its content does not. The spots fulfill their function as formal, repeated Minimalist building bricks, yet also resemble pills. In this way, the spot paintings are a pseudo-abstract extension of his pharmacy works. These paintings exemplify Western civilization's increasing faith in medicine as their subject. In the modern world Hirst perceives a shifting from religious faith to an almost blind faith in science and medicine. These are the new means of forestalling death and granting us our temporary salvations and respites, and by taking a scale more commonly associated with the religious paintings of yore, Hirst has created a painting that canonizes medication, an image of worship for the modern cult of science.
Many of Hirst's spot paintings make this link more overt by containing references to medication in their titles. However, Notechis Ater Humphreysi does the opposite by using the scientific name for the King Island (or Tasmanian) Tiger Snake, a highly venomous serpent from the south of Australia. While snake venom has been commercially used to create medicinal remedies for centuries, Hirst has created an image that refers to healing but references the toxic as well as the analgesic. He has openly connected the cause and the cure in one painting, and thereby illustrates our unquestioning faith in medicine and science.
Ultimately, though, Hirst remains opaque in his paintings, and the process of looking at them and reading into them is a playful one in which he is a complicit guide, and at the end of the day they are fun and aesthetically pleasing: "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" (D. Hirst quoted in Ibid., p. 246).
While the appearance of Notechis Ater Humphreysi, painted in 2000, bears out Hirst's claim to some form of happy Minimalism, its content does not. The spots fulfill their function as formal, repeated Minimalist building bricks, yet also resemble pills. In this way, the spot paintings are a pseudo-abstract extension of his pharmacy works. These paintings exemplify Western civilization's increasing faith in medicine as their subject. In the modern world Hirst perceives a shifting from religious faith to an almost blind faith in science and medicine. These are the new means of forestalling death and granting us our temporary salvations and respites, and by taking a scale more commonly associated with the religious paintings of yore, Hirst has created a painting that canonizes medication, an image of worship for the modern cult of science.
Many of Hirst's spot paintings make this link more overt by containing references to medication in their titles. However, Notechis Ater Humphreysi does the opposite by using the scientific name for the King Island (or Tasmanian) Tiger Snake, a highly venomous serpent from the south of Australia. While snake venom has been commercially used to create medicinal remedies for centuries, Hirst has created an image that refers to healing but references the toxic as well as the analgesic. He has openly connected the cause and the cure in one painting, and thereby illustrates our unquestioning faith in medicine and science.
Ultimately, though, Hirst remains opaque in his paintings, and the process of looking at them and reading into them is a playful one in which he is a complicit guide, and at the end of the day they are fun and aesthetically pleasing: "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" (D. Hirst quoted in Ibid., p. 246).