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Lot Essay
A kaleidoscopic symphony of colour, Veil of Serendipity is a dazzling work from Damien Hirst’s celebrated series of Veils. Warm shades of yellow, pink, crimson and orange collide with dappled greens and blues, speckled with brilliant flashes of white. The painting sparkles with optical magic, its impasto textures shifting in and out of focus as the canvas catches the light. Completed in 2017, just before Hirst’s major exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, the Veils represent joyful odes to the power of paint. Extending the language of his seminal Spot Paintings, as well as the Colour Space works of 2016, they were directly inspired by the Visual Candy paintings that Hirst created in New York in the 1990s. Shot through with the influence of Post-Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism and Op Art, they continue the exploration of gesture and colour that had fuelled this early series. Here, Hirst dispenses with the subversive conceptual language that underpins so much of his art, submitting instead to the sensory pleasures of brush and canvas.
Hirst’s Visual Candy paintings, defined by their tessellating patches of bright colour, had paid homage to his love of the New York School. During this intensely creative period—the heyday of the Young British Artists—he had felt conflicted by his affinity with painters such as Willem de Kooning. Much of his oeuvre at the time had its roots in Minimalism; dark, witty and ironic, his art confronted grandiose themes of life, death and faith. Wary of taking the plunge into pure gestural abstraction, Hirst instead channelled his love of colour into the Spot Paintings, whose obsessive grids of perfect yet randomly-coloured dots sought to capture the chaos of human existence. In 2016, the Colour Space paintings began to introduce a greater sense of painterly expression, embracing chance and error through the inclusion of drips and smears. In the Veil paintings, begun the following year, Hirst would finally pick up where he had left off over two decades prior, embracing the wonders of paint on a grand and unapologetic scale.
Using a long-bristled brush to dab, flick and spatter the canvas, Hirst relinquished both structure and concept. Instead, he explained, these works were ‘about now, about something energetic forming, like planets or ideas, they are about growth. I want them to feel like you’re looking through a sheer curtain at something patterned in a colourful, complicated garden beyond … I want you to get lost in them I want you to fall into them and I want them to delight your eyes’ (D. Hirst, Instagram, 28 February 2018). Hirst delved deep into art history, reigniting his passion not only for Abstract Expressionism, but also for the works of Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard and Georges Seurat. He looked at Goya’s mark-making and the paintings of Chaïm Soutine; he was ‘never that far away’, he professed, from ‘Op painters like Larry Poons or Bridget Riley, and Yayoi Kusama’. The results, he explained, ‘felt totally new and right’ (D. Hirst, quoted in A. McDonald, ‘In the Studio: Damien Hirst’s Veil Paintings’, Gagosian Quarterly, 4 July 2020). Veil of Serendipity sparkles with pure and uninhibited celebration: Hirst had, in many ways, finally returned home.
Hirst’s Visual Candy paintings, defined by their tessellating patches of bright colour, had paid homage to his love of the New York School. During this intensely creative period—the heyday of the Young British Artists—he had felt conflicted by his affinity with painters such as Willem de Kooning. Much of his oeuvre at the time had its roots in Minimalism; dark, witty and ironic, his art confronted grandiose themes of life, death and faith. Wary of taking the plunge into pure gestural abstraction, Hirst instead channelled his love of colour into the Spot Paintings, whose obsessive grids of perfect yet randomly-coloured dots sought to capture the chaos of human existence. In 2016, the Colour Space paintings began to introduce a greater sense of painterly expression, embracing chance and error through the inclusion of drips and smears. In the Veil paintings, begun the following year, Hirst would finally pick up where he had left off over two decades prior, embracing the wonders of paint on a grand and unapologetic scale.
Using a long-bristled brush to dab, flick and spatter the canvas, Hirst relinquished both structure and concept. Instead, he explained, these works were ‘about now, about something energetic forming, like planets or ideas, they are about growth. I want them to feel like you’re looking through a sheer curtain at something patterned in a colourful, complicated garden beyond … I want you to get lost in them I want you to fall into them and I want them to delight your eyes’ (D. Hirst, Instagram, 28 February 2018). Hirst delved deep into art history, reigniting his passion not only for Abstract Expressionism, but also for the works of Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard and Georges Seurat. He looked at Goya’s mark-making and the paintings of Chaïm Soutine; he was ‘never that far away’, he professed, from ‘Op painters like Larry Poons or Bridget Riley, and Yayoi Kusama’. The results, he explained, ‘felt totally new and right’ (D. Hirst, quoted in A. McDonald, ‘In the Studio: Damien Hirst’s Veil Paintings’, Gagosian Quarterly, 4 July 2020). Veil of Serendipity sparkles with pure and uninhibited celebration: Hirst had, in many ways, finally returned home.