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Lot Essay
‘I really like making [the Spin Paintings]. And I really like the machine, and I really like the movement. The movement sort of implies life. Every time they’re finished, I’m desperate to do another one… It’s so much fun to actually make them. I’ve got a video of David Bowie trying to stick his watch in one. I think he thought I painted them by hand.’
– Damien. Hirst, quoted in D. Hirst and G. Burn, On the Way to Work, London 2001, p. 221
An exhilarating whirlwind of colour and motion, Damien Hirst’s Beautiful Weave Your Cosmic Nets of Hypnosis Painting is a scintillating entry into his canon of iconic Spin Paintings. Employing a mechanical machine to rotate the canvas at breakneck speed, from the central axis Hirst saturates its surface with a kaleidoscope of polychromatic household emulsion paint. Whilst playfully mimicking the performative action painting of expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Hirst also negates any notion of the artist’s hand by allowing the unpredictability of chance to intercede, producing unique and astonishing results. Prefaced by the adjective ‘Beautiful’, the titles of the Spin Paintings suitably complement the dynamism of the works themselves. In the present work, the title is typically apt; the paint, flung across the canvas in multiple directions, both entrances and energises the viewer.
Hirst started making Spin Paintings in 1992. He conceived the idea when recalling an episode of Blue Peter with John Noakes in 1975, in which the presenter mesmerised Hirst and other young viewers by demonstrating how to make a spin painting of their own. In 1993, Hirst ran a ‘spin art stall’ at Joshua Compston’s artist-led street fair, ‘A Féte Worse than Death’, in which Hirst and fellow-artist Angus Fairhurst, both dressed in clown-costumes, encouraged visitors to create their own spin paintings for the bargain price of £1. Whilst living in Berlin the following year, Hirst owned a spinning machine which enabled him to develop and perfect his technique. Beautiful Weave Your Cosmic Nets of Hypnosis Painting exemplifies the artist’s mastered method of using a rush of colour to capture a moment in time. Commenting on this gestural mechanism as a way of expressing the transience of human experience, Andrew Wilson has claimed that Hirst’s Spin Paintings ‘illustrate the duality between a liquid or living state and a solid or dead one, capturing a sense of speed and material flux, which, however, is fossilised as soon as the canvas stops spinning and the paint finishes drying. In this sense they are memorials to the death of experience – memories of fleeting moments of immediacy and intensity that have passed’ (A. Wilson, ‘Believer’, in Damien Hirst, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2012, p. 205). By applying an explosive roar of colour onto a rapidly spinning canvas, Hirst celebrates a primordial joy of painting by capturing a process in the thrilling throes of immediacy.
– Damien. Hirst, quoted in D. Hirst and G. Burn, On the Way to Work, London 2001, p. 221
An exhilarating whirlwind of colour and motion, Damien Hirst’s Beautiful Weave Your Cosmic Nets of Hypnosis Painting is a scintillating entry into his canon of iconic Spin Paintings. Employing a mechanical machine to rotate the canvas at breakneck speed, from the central axis Hirst saturates its surface with a kaleidoscope of polychromatic household emulsion paint. Whilst playfully mimicking the performative action painting of expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Hirst also negates any notion of the artist’s hand by allowing the unpredictability of chance to intercede, producing unique and astonishing results. Prefaced by the adjective ‘Beautiful’, the titles of the Spin Paintings suitably complement the dynamism of the works themselves. In the present work, the title is typically apt; the paint, flung across the canvas in multiple directions, both entrances and energises the viewer.
Hirst started making Spin Paintings in 1992. He conceived the idea when recalling an episode of Blue Peter with John Noakes in 1975, in which the presenter mesmerised Hirst and other young viewers by demonstrating how to make a spin painting of their own. In 1993, Hirst ran a ‘spin art stall’ at Joshua Compston’s artist-led street fair, ‘A Féte Worse than Death’, in which Hirst and fellow-artist Angus Fairhurst, both dressed in clown-costumes, encouraged visitors to create their own spin paintings for the bargain price of £1. Whilst living in Berlin the following year, Hirst owned a spinning machine which enabled him to develop and perfect his technique. Beautiful Weave Your Cosmic Nets of Hypnosis Painting exemplifies the artist’s mastered method of using a rush of colour to capture a moment in time. Commenting on this gestural mechanism as a way of expressing the transience of human experience, Andrew Wilson has claimed that Hirst’s Spin Paintings ‘illustrate the duality between a liquid or living state and a solid or dead one, capturing a sense of speed and material flux, which, however, is fossilised as soon as the canvas stops spinning and the paint finishes drying. In this sense they are memorials to the death of experience – memories of fleeting moments of immediacy and intensity that have passed’ (A. Wilson, ‘Believer’, in Damien Hirst, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2012, p. 205). By applying an explosive roar of colour onto a rapidly spinning canvas, Hirst celebrates a primordial joy of painting by capturing a process in the thrilling throes of immediacy.