Diva

Part of Damien Hirst’s celebrated Colour Space cycle, Diva is a thrilling chromatic symphony that featured in the artist’s 2018 exhibition dedicated to the series at Houghton Hall, Norfolk. Across its vast surface, spanning nearly two and a half metres, Hirst creates a kaleidoscopic web of tonalities, his dots mingling and colliding amid drips and splashes of paint. Created in 2016, Hirst’s Colour Space paintings were conceived as an extension of his seminal Spot Paintings, begun exactly thirty years prior. While these works came to be known for their rigorous grid-like structures, each spot precisely and meticulously placed, the Colour Space paintings hark back to Hirst’s very first Spots, which were more intuitively and spontaneously rendered. Three decades after the young artist had rejected the temptations of free gestural expression, here he embraced it anew, relishing the chaotic, messy delight of paint. In doing so, he gave new form to the themes that had always underpinned his oeuvre: the randomness of human existence, and the power of art to make sense of it.  

Hirst’s Colour Space paintings cleaved to the same basic principles as the Spots. No colour was repeated within any given canvas, and the dot size remained consistent within each work. Beyond this, however, there were no formal rules regarding the placement and execution of the dots, or indeed the orientation of the finished painting. Inspired early on by his encounters with Minimalism and Gerhard Richter’s Colour Charts, the young Hirst had famously claimed that he wanted his Spot Paintings to ‘look like they’ve been made by a person trying to paint like a machine’ (D. Hirst, quoted in conversation with S. Calle, Internal Affairs, London 1991, unpaged). His decision to name them after chemical compounds was part and parcel of this idea, invoking humankind’s attempts to catalogue the chaos of the universe. In the Colour Space paintings, by contrast, Hirst openly embraced human error, capturing ‘the fallibility of the human hand in the drips and inconsistencies’ (D. Hirst, quoted in Damien Hirst: Colour Space Paintings, exh. cat Gagosian, New York 2018, p. 1). While the Spot Paintings were conceived as an endless cycle, Colour Space was a finite series completed within a single year: a controlled snapshot of our own unpredictability.

More broadly, writes Blake Gopnik, works such as the present serve as microcosms of art-making itself. ‘They represent a world—and an art world—made up entirely of tiny details,’ he explains, ‘like the universe in its early moments when matter and energy were spread in an even spray across the vast expanse of all Being.’ They are ‘atoms’—or ‘artoms’, suggests Gopnik—that represent ‘the most basic unit of creativity’: a truth acknowledged all the way from the minute flecks of white in the eyes of a Renaissance portrait, to the enlarged dabs of colour employed by the Pointillists. ‘Hirst’s dots’, he concludes, ‘can easily stand for the tiny fragments of pigment, afloat in the void, that are the truly fundamental units of Western painting’ (B. Gopnik, ‘Damien Hirst: Depiction Degree Zero’, ibid., p. 8). If the Spot Paintings acknowledged that our attempts to rationalise the world are ultimately futile, Colour Space offered a glimpse of the wonderment that arises from the process. We might not arrive at answers, and our journey might be littered with mistakes, yet we might—along the way—lose ourselves in a glittering frenzy of colour and light.