Damien Hirst Damien Hirst The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991 Glass, steel, silicon, formaldehyde and shark 2170 x 5420 x 1800 mm Photograph: Prudence Cuming Associates © Damien Hirst. All rights reserved, DACS 2010 1 Artist Rooms Damien Hirst is the most prominent artist to have emerged from the British art scene in the 1990s. His role as an artist and curator has proved fundamental in the development of the group that became internationally known as ‘the YBAs’ (Young British Artists). Hirst’s work asks viewers to question the main dilemmas of human existence: birth, illness, death and religion. The ARTIST ROOMS collection (jointly owned and managed by Tate and National Galleries of Scotland) comprises five important works spanning Hirst’s career including photography, painting, sculpture and installation. The early photograph taken in a morgue, With Dead Head is included, displaying an early preoccupation with death. Away from the Flock - one of his ‘Natural History’ works featuring dead animals floating in vitrines - is also on show, featuring a sheep floating in formaldehyde. The lamb looks alive but is dead, and references the religious theme of the lamb of God. Religion is explored further in the large triptych work, Trinity - Pharmacology, Physiology, Pathology, in which medical products become a replacement for faith. Hirst is also recognised for his mirrored pharmacy cabinets lined with shelves full of drug bottles, pills, sea shells or cigarette butts, and his paintings, both which he produces in series. Included in this collection is the early Controlled Substances Key Painting (Spot 4a), a canvas where a grid of dots of different colours is accompanied by letters in alphabetical order that seem to dissect and reorganise the very matter of painting into cells. The most recent painting in the collection, the large butterfly diptych Monument to the Living and the Dead, was made by Hirst specifically for Anthony d’Offay’s collection. Introduction to the YBAs In the late 1980s British art entered what was quickly recognised as a new and excitingly distinctive phase, the era of what became known as the YBAs – the Young British Artists. Young British Art can be seen to have a convenient starting point in the exhibition Freeze organised in 1988 by Damien Hirst (the most celebrated, or notorious, of the YBAs) while he was still a student at Goldsmiths College of Art. Freeze included the work of fellow Goldsmiths students, many of whom also became leading artists associated with the YBAs, such as Sarah Lucas, Angus Fairhurst and Michael Landy. Goldsmiths College of Art played an important role in the development of the movement. It had for some years been fostering new forms of creativity through its courses which abolished the traditional separation of media into painting, sculpture, printmaking etc. Michael Craig-Martin was among its most influential teachers. What does YBA art look like? Although certain broad trends both formal and thematic can be seen in YBA art (such as the use of found objects and imagery that is sometimes perceived as shocking), there is no one YBA style or approach. The era is marked by a complete openness towards the materials and processes with which art can be made, and the form that it can take. 2 Leading YBA artists have preserved dead animals (Damien Hirst); crushed found objects with a steamroller (Cornelia Parker); appropriated objects from medical history (Christine Borland); presented her own bed as art (Tracey Emin); made sculpture from fresh food, cigarettes, or women’s tights (Sarah Lucas). YBA artists have made extensive use of film, video and photography; used drawing and printmaking in every conceivable way (e.g. Michael Landy); increasingly developed the concept of the installation (a multi-part work occupying a single space), and not least, refreshed and revitalised the art of painting (Gary Hume). The YBA brand The first use of the term ‘young British artists’ to describe the work of Hirst and these other young artists was by Michael Corris in Artforum, May 1992. The acronym ‘YBA’ was coined later in 1996 in Art Monthly magazine. The label turned out to be a powerful brand recognised worldwide and a useful marketing tool for the artists associated with it (as well as for British art generally in the 1990s). One of the features that defines the YBAs is their ‘can do’ entrepreneurial approach to showing and marketing their work. This can be seen in ambitious exhibitions such as Freeze organised by Hirst and his contemporaries, as well as in ventures such as the Pharmacy restaurant opened in Notting Hill in 1998 and backed by Hirst, and The Shop set up in an empty shop in East London by artists Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas in order to market their work. 3 Damien Hirst’s works Spot Painting, 1986 Damien Hirst, Spot Painting 1986. Household gloss on board. Painting 2438 x 3658 mm “To create that structure, to do those colours, and do nothing. I suddenly got what I wanted. It was just a way of pinning down the joy of colour.” (Damien Hirst cited in Damien Hirst and Gordon Burn, ‘On the Way to Work’, Faber and Faber, 2001) Spot Painting is one of Hirst’s first experimental spot paintings, created whilst in his first year at Goldsmiths. In 1988, after having created a series of hand-painted spot paintings on board such as ‘Spot Painting’, and the first work on canvas Untitled (with Black Dot) (1988), Hirst painted two near-identical arrangements of coloured spots onto the wall of the ‘Freeze’ warehouse. He called the works Edge (1988) and Row (1988). These paintings followed some loose hand-painted spots on board such as this one, dating from 1986, and the first spot work on canvas Untitled (with Black Dot) (1988) – the only ‘Pharmaceutical’ painting ever to have incorporated a black dot. Following ‘Freeze’, Hirst started to refine his creative process. Slowly, he began to employ assistants to create the spot paintings. Any physical evidence of human intervention – such as the compass point left at the centre of each spot – was removed, until the works appeared to have been constructed mechanically, or “by a person trying to paint like a machine”. For Hirst, it was a departure from 4 years of experimenting with paint and collage, and the first result of his search for a contemporary art form that could succeed without a reliance on “already organised elements.” The random and infinite colour series within the ‘Pharmaceutical’ paintings is integral to the works. Hirst explains that, “mathematically, with the spot paintings, I probably discovered the most fundamentally important thing in any kind of art. Which is the harmony of where colour can exist on its own, interacting with other colours in a perfect format.” Any problems he had previously had with colour, Hirst claims, were removed by the perfect arrangement of complimentary, yet never repeated, colours in the spots. The spot paintings vary in size from a 40 foot canvas containing spots of 1 inch, Iodomethane- 13c (1999 - 2000), to Erbium Oxide (2009), which has only four 60 inch spots, to L-Isoleucinol (2008 - 2011), which measures ten by sixteen inches and contains 25,781 one millimeter spots. Their titles are taken arbitrarily from the chemical company Sigma-Aldrich’s catalogue ‘Biochemicals for Research and Diagnostic Reagents’, a book Hirst stumbled across in the early 1990’s. The grid formula within the ‘Pharmaceutical’ paintings was the basis for an endless series. Over the last 24 years, Hirst has produced on average 60 spot paintings a year. “I started them as an endless series ... a scientific approach to painting in a similar way to the drug companies’ scientific approach to life. Art doesn’t purport to have all the answers; the drug companies do. Hence the title of the series, The Pharmaceutical Paintings, and the individual titles of the paintings themselves: Acetaldehyde (1991), Albumin Human Glycated (1992), Androstanotone (1993) ... On each painting no two colours are the same ... I can still make all the emotional decisions about colour that I need to as an artist, but in the end they are lost.” In 2012 Gagosian Gallery exhibited over 300 spot paintings across eleven gallery spaces worldwide. Conceived as a single exhibition, ‘The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011’ fulfilled Hirst’s longstanding ambition to show the works together. He explained in 2000 of the idea of an installation of multiple spot paintings, “it’s an assault on your senses. They grab hold of you and give you a good shaking. As adults, we’re not used to it. It’s an amazing fact that all objects leap beyond their own dimension.” Damien Hirst, Row 1988. Household gloss on wall. 5 With Dead Head, 1991 Damien Hirst, With Dead Head, 1991. Photograph, black and white, on paper on aluminium. Image 572 x 762 mm. Tate / National Galleries of Scotland With Dead Head is a black and white photograph of the artist when he was a teenager, posing with the head of a corpse. In 1992 he recounted the making of the image: “It’s me and a dead head. Severed head. In the morgue. Human. I’m sixteen ... If you look at my face, I’m actually going: ‘Quick. Quick. Take the photo.’ It’s worry. I wanted to show my friends, but I couldn’t take all my friends there, to the morgue in Leeds. I’m absolutely terrified. I’m grinning, but I’m expecting the eyes to open and for it to go: ‘Grrrrraaaaagh!’. I was doing anatomy drawing. I took some photos when I shouldn’t have done.