November 5, 2024

(Not just) spots on a wall – a review of Hirst’s spot paintings, exhibited at Gagosian in Geneva

There is a chance that 2012 will go down in history as Damien Hirst year. In April, the Tate Modern in London will be hosting the first retrospective of his work, and Gagosian’s current worldwide exhibition of some 330 spot paintings is an exciting opening act to this event. Even if calling this exhibition “The Complete Spot Paintings” seems a bit of a misnomer, as the artist produced over 1500 of these paintings.

Hirst’s exhibition at Gagosian in Geneva – held on the upstairs floor of number 19 place de Longemalle – counts eight pieces of various sizes produced between 1994 and 2011. Sporting cumbersome titles of pharmaceutical drugs like “Arabinofurandsyladenine-5-Monophosphate” and “3-Bromobenzaldehyde”, all eight canvases were lent to the exhibition by Swiss private collectors.

Hirst’s spot paintings fit neatly into the history of Western art, and this might explain why they look so oddly familiar. Their iridescent glossiness and vibrant candy colors derive from pop art, which leaves one fantasizing about seeing them displayed next to a Takashi Murakami. The spots also possess something of the minimalist appeal of a Piet Mondrian color grid or a Donald Judd stainless steel sculpture, and their rigid, machine-made aesthetic reminds us of the greatest of all art entrepreneurs, Andy Warhol.

The exhibition has an undeniable commercial flair because the spots are now widely recognized as Hirstian prototypes, even if numerous artists before him used spots in their work – most notably, Gerhard Richter and Yayoi Kusama. Gagosian in Geneva also happens to be a “spot shop location”, which means that visitors are able to acquire some spotty paraphernalia such as a bag or a T-shirt labeled “I ? DH”.

The titles of the spot paintings neatly connect with the rest of Hirst’s pharmaceutically-bent oeuvre, most obviously, his pill-filled cabinets. Reading the spots metaphorically as pills, the paintings remind us of modern society’s dependence on pharmaceutical drugs, leading to an anaesthetized existence and sometimes death. All of this brings the spots into closer parallel with the rest of Hirst’s angst-ridden oeuvre than we might have at first imagined.

While they might leave some viewers yearning for Hirst’s usual prophetic tone and bravado showmanship that we associate with his bisected animals displayed in tanks of formaldahyde, the spot paintings belong to a design concept that is arguably just as ambitious. The rules behind their production are that “no spot should be the same shade or color as any other in a particular painting: the spots would always be painted by hand in household gloss paint on canvas: and the gaps between the spots should be the same width as the spots.” (Bracewell) Hirst has produced some 1500 spot paintings to date. Originally he had set out to make this an infinite series, but a few years ago he decided to bring the sequence to an end. This was a smart move on his part, as this statement will ensure that his spot enterprise is all the more commercially viable.

Today Hirst’s spot paintings are located in dozens of museums, galleries and private collections worldwide. Working on this global scale, Hirst’s work can be likened to that of a CERN physicist whose work on “splitting the atom” has resulted in an explosion of spots across the planet. Each individual spot can be viewed as a small fragment of a much larger organism. In the same way, his twelve cow parts, exhibited under the title Some Comfort Gained From the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything, can only be viewed as constituent elements of a whole.

Spend enough time with something, and it will start to tame you, even if that thing is just a spot on a wall. After visiting this exhibition, chances are that you will be more attentive to spots forever afterwards, which leaves me wondering, isn’t it about time that someone out there curated an exhibition centered on the dot from Seurat to Hirst?

 

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