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Lot Essay
A veil is a barrier, a curtain between two things, something that you can look at and pass through, it’s solid yet invisible and reveals and yet obscures the truth, the thing that we are searching for.Damien Hirst
Stretching six feet in height, Damien Hirst’s Veil of Imagination is a cascade of jubilant Technicolor. Across the expansive canvas, lilac, yellow, pale blue, and bubble-gum pink spots explode and flutter like confetti. The work is one of the artist’s Veil paintings. Conceived as a finite series each layered with dots, daubs and dollops of brightly-colored impasto. Marking a pivotal shift in his working methods, and indeed his approach to series more broadly, Hirst painted his Veil works alone, working on several canvases at once. Immersing himself totally in chromatic splendor, the works continue the artist’s career-long interest in the pleasurable optic effects of color, as can be traced through his seminal ‘Spot Paintings’ to his later ‘Spin Paintings’. “I believe all painting and art should be uplifting for the viewer”, Hirst has said, “I love color. I feel it inside me. It gives me a buzz” (D. Hirst, I Want to Spend the Rest of my Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Forever, Now, London, 1997, p. 246).
Indeed, Hirst pays homage to the iconic and unmistakable language of his spots in the present work. Describing the Veils, the artist revealed: “I have a selection of colors I love and use over and over again. They are like sweet shop colors and the colors of fruit and flowers” (D. Hirst interviewed by A. McDonald, “In The Studio: Damien Hirst’s Veil Paintings,” Gagosian Quarterly, July 4, 2020). Where his earlier works featured meticulously rendered, flat and almost machine-made spots, however, Veil of Imagination presents a rich field of texture. It flickers with live and unbridled potential. Starting by priming each canvas with a different color, Hirst went on to use a long bristle brush—around two to two-and-a-half feet long—to apply thick impasto stipples of pigment. Establishing crucial physical distance from his painterly surface, this technique meant he could perceive the dense tessellation of individual daubs as a coalescent whole, in which flecks of bright color meld and effervesce.
I want them to feel like you’re looking through a sheer curtain at something patterned in a colorful, complicated garden beyond. Damien Hirst
Hirst’s technique pays homage to the radical stylistic developments of late-nineteenth century Impressionism and post-Impressionism. Veil of Imagination feels like it could be a magnified sample of Seurat’s Pointillist landscapes, Bonnard’s interiors blooming with brilliant floral arrangements or Monet’s water garden at Giverny, speckled with pale flowers. Hirst himself has compared the effect of his Veil works to Monet’s dappled waterlily ponds. Just as the water’s surface had constituted a visually spectacular, reflective boundary worthy of representation upon the picture plane, Hirst considered his canvas itself as a “veil”, a fine film separating one realm from another. “I wanted to make paintings that were a celebration”, he says, “that revealed something and obscured something at the same time” (D. Hirst interviewed by A. McDonald, ibid.). Here, beneath a mesmeric surface of vibrating, fleeting color, he promises a world of imagination, fantasy, and delight.
The Veil paintings mark a pivotal move away from the artist’s longstanding allegiance to hard-edged Minimalism—seen in his organization of form, painted or three-dimensional, within gridded, cubic structures like vitrines and cabinets and pharmaceutical packaging—towards a looser, gestural abstraction. Releasing form and color upon large-scale canvases, Hirst cultivates a sensorily immersive experience evocative of the “all-over” approach of Abstract Expressionism. His embrace of gestural mark-making and his fascination with the interactive, emotive effects of pure color denote the legacy of the New York School, which included such legendary painters as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. “I’ve always liked paintings that are exciting to the eye”, Hirst has said. “I suppose dots come out of that. It’s a surface that moves” (D. Hirst, quoted in D. Vankin, “Why Damien Hirst is seeing dots in his new work on view in Beverley Hills”, Los Angeles Times, March 23, 2018).
The artist has reflected on his attraction to series as a defining mode of his artistic expression. He relates them to the dialectic underpinning his practice, that of permanence and impermanence, mortality and immortality. “They are a battle with the idea of death”, he says. “The infinite series I made at the beginning of my career was a way for me to not face that. It’s a great way to imagine that you will last forever—even though you won’t. Now that I’m older the series are getting smaller, and that feels more realistic” (D. Hirst interviewed by A. McDonald, ibid.). Part of an intimate and purposeful series, the present work stands as a rare expression of unbounded joy in Hirst’s oeuvre, celebratory in the face of its own finitude.
Stretching six feet in height, Damien Hirst’s Veil of Imagination is a cascade of jubilant Technicolor. Across the expansive canvas, lilac, yellow, pale blue, and bubble-gum pink spots explode and flutter like confetti. The work is one of the artist’s Veil paintings. Conceived as a finite series each layered with dots, daubs and dollops of brightly-colored impasto. Marking a pivotal shift in his working methods, and indeed his approach to series more broadly, Hirst painted his Veil works alone, working on several canvases at once. Immersing himself totally in chromatic splendor, the works continue the artist’s career-long interest in the pleasurable optic effects of color, as can be traced through his seminal ‘Spot Paintings’ to his later ‘Spin Paintings’. “I believe all painting and art should be uplifting for the viewer”, Hirst has said, “I love color. I feel it inside me. It gives me a buzz” (D. Hirst, I Want to Spend the Rest of my Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Forever, Now, London, 1997, p. 246).
Indeed, Hirst pays homage to the iconic and unmistakable language of his spots in the present work. Describing the Veils, the artist revealed: “I have a selection of colors I love and use over and over again. They are like sweet shop colors and the colors of fruit and flowers” (D. Hirst interviewed by A. McDonald, “In The Studio: Damien Hirst’s Veil Paintings,” Gagosian Quarterly, July 4, 2020). Where his earlier works featured meticulously rendered, flat and almost machine-made spots, however, Veil of Imagination presents a rich field of texture. It flickers with live and unbridled potential. Starting by priming each canvas with a different color, Hirst went on to use a long bristle brush—around two to two-and-a-half feet long—to apply thick impasto stipples of pigment. Establishing crucial physical distance from his painterly surface, this technique meant he could perceive the dense tessellation of individual daubs as a coalescent whole, in which flecks of bright color meld and effervesce.
I want them to feel like you’re looking through a sheer curtain at something patterned in a colorful, complicated garden beyond. Damien Hirst
Hirst’s technique pays homage to the radical stylistic developments of late-nineteenth century Impressionism and post-Impressionism. Veil of Imagination feels like it could be a magnified sample of Seurat’s Pointillist landscapes, Bonnard’s interiors blooming with brilliant floral arrangements or Monet’s water garden at Giverny, speckled with pale flowers. Hirst himself has compared the effect of his Veil works to Monet’s dappled waterlily ponds. Just as the water’s surface had constituted a visually spectacular, reflective boundary worthy of representation upon the picture plane, Hirst considered his canvas itself as a “veil”, a fine film separating one realm from another. “I wanted to make paintings that were a celebration”, he says, “that revealed something and obscured something at the same time” (D. Hirst interviewed by A. McDonald, ibid.). Here, beneath a mesmeric surface of vibrating, fleeting color, he promises a world of imagination, fantasy, and delight.
The Veil paintings mark a pivotal move away from the artist’s longstanding allegiance to hard-edged Minimalism—seen in his organization of form, painted or three-dimensional, within gridded, cubic structures like vitrines and cabinets and pharmaceutical packaging—towards a looser, gestural abstraction. Releasing form and color upon large-scale canvases, Hirst cultivates a sensorily immersive experience evocative of the “all-over” approach of Abstract Expressionism. His embrace of gestural mark-making and his fascination with the interactive, emotive effects of pure color denote the legacy of the New York School, which included such legendary painters as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. “I’ve always liked paintings that are exciting to the eye”, Hirst has said. “I suppose dots come out of that. It’s a surface that moves” (D. Hirst, quoted in D. Vankin, “Why Damien Hirst is seeing dots in his new work on view in Beverley Hills”, Los Angeles Times, March 23, 2018).
The artist has reflected on his attraction to series as a defining mode of his artistic expression. He relates them to the dialectic underpinning his practice, that of permanence and impermanence, mortality and immortality. “They are a battle with the idea of death”, he says. “The infinite series I made at the beginning of my career was a way for me to not face that. It’s a great way to imagine that you will last forever—even though you won’t. Now that I’m older the series are getting smaller, and that feels more realistic” (D. Hirst interviewed by A. McDonald, ibid.). Part of an intimate and purposeful series, the present work stands as a rare expression of unbounded joy in Hirst’s oeuvre, celebratory in the face of its own finitude.