.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
拍品专文
With its evocative, radial burst of colour, Damien Hirst’s Beautiful Squawk Painting (with Butterflies) (2007) pulses with joyful energy. Out of a vortex of red burst waves of turquoise, yellow, navy, and momentous streaks of sky blue. Hirst poured household paints onto a rotating canvas to achieve these kaleidoscopic patterns, and they present a striking index of spontaneous gesture in bright, dazzling colour. Atop the medley of frenetic movement flutter delicate butterflies with gossamer wings. As such, the work combines the action painting of the artist’s iconic ‘Spin’ series with the evanescent insects that adorn so many of his canvases. While the vivacious colours teem with life, the artist’s use of butterflies also ties the painting to Hirst’s career-long inquiry into themes of mortality.
The inspiration for the spin paintings dates to the artist’s childhood, when he watched John Noakes, the host of the children’s show ‘Blue Peter’, create a spin painting on air. ‘I remember thinking “that’s fun, whereas art is something more serious”’, said Hirst (D. Hirst quoted in ‘Damien Hirst reveals Blue Peter inspiration’, BBC News, 29 August 2012). He recalled this initial enthusiasm when, a few years older, he attended a school fair and spent the day queuing and queuing again at a stall where he could make his own spin paintings. It was not until 1994, however, that Hirst himself fabricated his own spinning machine. He revelled in the frenzied aesthetic thrills that such a simple engine could produce.
At once a meditation on chaos and order, chance and predestiny, Beautiful Squawk Painting (with Butterflies) reveals the ways in which external forces always shape reality. Control and its loss fascinate Hirst, and in the present work—as in all the spin paintings—the artist effectively absents his hand from the final composition; the speed of the machine and the colour of the paint are the only two elements that determine the final image. As Hirst has said, ‘it is just chaos really’ (D. Hirst quoted in Damien Hirst, exh. cat. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples 2004, p. 195). In a world where so much is chance and haphazard, the spin paintings celebrate the possibilities that fate has in store for us all: a theme foregrounded by the present work’s addition of Hirst’s butterflies, which become a gleaming memento mori.
The inspiration for the spin paintings dates to the artist’s childhood, when he watched John Noakes, the host of the children’s show ‘Blue Peter’, create a spin painting on air. ‘I remember thinking “that’s fun, whereas art is something more serious”’, said Hirst (D. Hirst quoted in ‘Damien Hirst reveals Blue Peter inspiration’, BBC News, 29 August 2012). He recalled this initial enthusiasm when, a few years older, he attended a school fair and spent the day queuing and queuing again at a stall where he could make his own spin paintings. It was not until 1994, however, that Hirst himself fabricated his own spinning machine. He revelled in the frenzied aesthetic thrills that such a simple engine could produce.
At once a meditation on chaos and order, chance and predestiny, Beautiful Squawk Painting (with Butterflies) reveals the ways in which external forces always shape reality. Control and its loss fascinate Hirst, and in the present work—as in all the spin paintings—the artist effectively absents his hand from the final composition; the speed of the machine and the colour of the paint are the only two elements that determine the final image. As Hirst has said, ‘it is just chaos really’ (D. Hirst quoted in Damien Hirst, exh. cat. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples 2004, p. 195). In a world where so much is chance and haphazard, the spin paintings celebrate the possibilities that fate has in store for us all: a theme foregrounded by the present work’s addition of Hirst’s butterflies, which become a gleaming memento mori.