.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Standing at an impressive height of over two metres, Damien Hirst’s Malic Dehydrogenase from Bovine Heart (1999) is a rare and early work from his iconic ‘spot paintings’. Instantly recognisable, one hundred and sixty-five pastel spots are composed in perfect rows and columns upon a pale blue canvas. Measuring three inches in diameter and spaced exactly three inches apart, these meticulously hand-painted spots seem to have their own pulse, and engross the viewer in a state of perceptual rapture. The work belongs to Hirst’s ‘Venoms’ group, a subseries of spot paintings distinct for their lightly gradated, pale spots which denote the poisonous chemicals excreted by animals, namely snakes, bees and spiders. A scarce subgroup in 1999, the first of the Venoms on canvas dates from just one year before, making our work one of the earliest and also one of the largest of its kind at the time it was made. Famously thinking of his spots as cells under a microscope, Hirst’s man-made, clinical style draws parallels between the revered systems of belief that underscore his artistic practice: art, science and religion.
Employing a formal language that pays homage to his Minimalist forebearers, Hirst’s canvas is arranged with a mathematical precision. Pictorial form is abstracted to its constituent, molecular parts in a process akin to chemical filtration. The grid of uniquely coloured spots—the artist orders that no single spot is painted in the same shade—evokes a production line. Assuming the look of mechanically manufactured perfection, the neat rows recall pills and tablets sealed in shiny plastic and foil strips, or shelved medicines as seen in Hirst’s cabinet works and installation ‘Pharmacy’ (1992). Fascinated by the sanctity of drugs, which promise to cure ailments and prolong life, Hirst’s spot paintings conjure the quasi-religious rituals that surround pharmaceutics. Pills come with their own scripture, sacrosanct instructions and routines. The aesthetic language of Minimalism is rife in pharmacies and hospitals; cleanliness and purification are prerequisites for medical procedure. Hirst has observed ‘you’ve got to wash your hands before you start messing around with people’s bodies … you wear white coats because then you can see blood on it’, arguing that ‘with clear forms and perfect edges then people can feel secure. It’s a confidence’ (D. Hirst in conversation with G. Burn, 2001, quoted in ’Look Closer: Explore Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy’, Tate, online).
Beneath the satisfying simplicity of the present painting’s gentle pastel palette and polka-dot design lies a toxic chemical compound with lethal implications. Reflecting on his series, Hirst describes how ‘in every painting there is a subliminal sense of unease; the colours project so much joy it’s hard to feel it, but it’s there. The horror underlying everything’ (D. Hirst, I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, With Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, London 1997, p. 246). Contextualised in his broader oeuvre, the spot paintings speak to the artist’s life-long examination of the macabre within a hard-edged, sterile Minimalist framework. The present work—titled after an enzyme found in bovine tissue—further relates to the artist’s use of cow heads and cadavers in the 1990s. Famously, his Mother and Child Divided (1993), which won him the Turner Prize in 1995, comprised four stainless steel vitrines, containing the bisected bodies of a cow and a calf in formaldehyde solution. It is perhaps in Hirst’s Venoms series that the dialogue between beauty and mortality is most concisely addressed. Conflating cleanliness with the spot—itself a mark of impurity that threatens to spread and mutate infinitely beyond the canvas’s boundaries—the work holds the complex dualities of Hirst’s art in masterful tension.
Employing a formal language that pays homage to his Minimalist forebearers, Hirst’s canvas is arranged with a mathematical precision. Pictorial form is abstracted to its constituent, molecular parts in a process akin to chemical filtration. The grid of uniquely coloured spots—the artist orders that no single spot is painted in the same shade—evokes a production line. Assuming the look of mechanically manufactured perfection, the neat rows recall pills and tablets sealed in shiny plastic and foil strips, or shelved medicines as seen in Hirst’s cabinet works and installation ‘Pharmacy’ (1992). Fascinated by the sanctity of drugs, which promise to cure ailments and prolong life, Hirst’s spot paintings conjure the quasi-religious rituals that surround pharmaceutics. Pills come with their own scripture, sacrosanct instructions and routines. The aesthetic language of Minimalism is rife in pharmacies and hospitals; cleanliness and purification are prerequisites for medical procedure. Hirst has observed ‘you’ve got to wash your hands before you start messing around with people’s bodies … you wear white coats because then you can see blood on it’, arguing that ‘with clear forms and perfect edges then people can feel secure. It’s a confidence’ (D. Hirst in conversation with G. Burn, 2001, quoted in ’Look Closer: Explore Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy’, Tate, online).
Beneath the satisfying simplicity of the present painting’s gentle pastel palette and polka-dot design lies a toxic chemical compound with lethal implications. Reflecting on his series, Hirst describes how ‘in every painting there is a subliminal sense of unease; the colours project so much joy it’s hard to feel it, but it’s there. The horror underlying everything’ (D. Hirst, I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, With Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, London 1997, p. 246). Contextualised in his broader oeuvre, the spot paintings speak to the artist’s life-long examination of the macabre within a hard-edged, sterile Minimalist framework. The present work—titled after an enzyme found in bovine tissue—further relates to the artist’s use of cow heads and cadavers in the 1990s. Famously, his Mother and Child Divided (1993), which won him the Turner Prize in 1995, comprised four stainless steel vitrines, containing the bisected bodies of a cow and a calf in formaldehyde solution. It is perhaps in Hirst’s Venoms series that the dialogue between beauty and mortality is most concisely addressed. Conflating cleanliness with the spot—itself a mark of impurity that threatens to spread and mutate infinitely beyond the canvas’s boundaries—the work holds the complex dualities of Hirst’s art in masterful tension.