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Lot Essay
‘The Spin Paintings gather and amalgamate the individuality of every individual colour, introducing a mechanical rotating movement at the moment of execution, to make the colours participate in a primordial state, where order and creation dissolve and disengage from the mediation of thought and representation, to become pure expression of the basic and vital gesture of painting and its mythology’
(M. Codognato, quoted in ‘Warning Labels’, in Damien Hirst, exh. cat., Museo Archeological Nazionale, Naples, 2004, p. 42).
Throughout his career, Damien Hirst has defied artistic conventions, pushing and expanding the boundaries of contemporary art, stretching the viewer’s perception of what is possible, and indeed what can be contextualized as ‘art’ itself. The present lot, beautiful, hydrochloric, non-functional, expansive, vortex, whorl, wizz painting, falls into a body of work that act as a fantastic thread of Hirst’s oeuvre, a culmination of the artist’s enthusiasm for his materials and the spontaneity and energy inherent in the creative process.
The Spin Paintings, a body of work Hirst started in the early 1990s, are distinguished by their elongated evocative and playful titles that start with ‘beautiful’ and end with ‘painting’, referencing quite literally the act of making, the abundance of adjectives containing a rhythm that follows the rotation, emphasizing the kinetic energy of the works. In the present work, Hirst offers the ‘hydrochloric, non-functional, expansive, vortex, whorl, wizz’, conjuring a vision of a rapidly spinning wheel. It is this centrifugal speed of the canvas that causes the paint to bespatter and swirl creating a multitude of stratums to form across the circular surface. Executed in a highly keyed colour palette, rich electric yellows, vermilion reds, and deep navy are set off and accentuated by the slash
shocking pink. Pulsating with its tonal energies, beautiful, hydrochloric, non-functional, expansive, vortex, whorl, wizz painting is a liberated explosion of colour.
Inspired by memories of the making of spin paintings he saw as a child on the children’s television programme ‘Blue Peter’, the ‘Spin’ series are almost completely oriented towards the celebration of life and technology, culture and
the inherent beauty of things even in spite of the feverish activity of their own inception. The Spin Paintings are to Hirst ‘a miracle of technology..., I really like making them. And I really like the machine, and I really like the movement. The movement sort of implies life’ (D. Hirst, quoted in G. Burn & D. Hirst, On the Way to Work, London 2001, p. 221). Capturing this movement through colour, beautiful, hydrochloric, non-functional, expansive, vortex, whorl, wizz painting is an ecstatic and dynamic festivity of colour and action.
(M. Codognato, quoted in ‘Warning Labels’, in Damien Hirst, exh. cat., Museo Archeological Nazionale, Naples, 2004, p. 42).
Throughout his career, Damien Hirst has defied artistic conventions, pushing and expanding the boundaries of contemporary art, stretching the viewer’s perception of what is possible, and indeed what can be contextualized as ‘art’ itself. The present lot, beautiful, hydrochloric, non-functional, expansive, vortex, whorl, wizz painting, falls into a body of work that act as a fantastic thread of Hirst’s oeuvre, a culmination of the artist’s enthusiasm for his materials and the spontaneity and energy inherent in the creative process.
The Spin Paintings, a body of work Hirst started in the early 1990s, are distinguished by their elongated evocative and playful titles that start with ‘beautiful’ and end with ‘painting’, referencing quite literally the act of making, the abundance of adjectives containing a rhythm that follows the rotation, emphasizing the kinetic energy of the works. In the present work, Hirst offers the ‘hydrochloric, non-functional, expansive, vortex, whorl, wizz’, conjuring a vision of a rapidly spinning wheel. It is this centrifugal speed of the canvas that causes the paint to bespatter and swirl creating a multitude of stratums to form across the circular surface. Executed in a highly keyed colour palette, rich electric yellows, vermilion reds, and deep navy are set off and accentuated by the slash
shocking pink. Pulsating with its tonal energies, beautiful, hydrochloric, non-functional, expansive, vortex, whorl, wizz painting is a liberated explosion of colour.
Inspired by memories of the making of spin paintings he saw as a child on the children’s television programme ‘Blue Peter’, the ‘Spin’ series are almost completely oriented towards the celebration of life and technology, culture and
the inherent beauty of things even in spite of the feverish activity of their own inception. The Spin Paintings are to Hirst ‘a miracle of technology..., I really like making them. And I really like the machine, and I really like the movement. The movement sort of implies life’ (D. Hirst, quoted in G. Burn & D. Hirst, On the Way to Work, London 2001, p. 221). Capturing this movement through colour, beautiful, hydrochloric, non-functional, expansive, vortex, whorl, wizz painting is an ecstatic and dynamic festivity of colour and action.