Damien Hirst

White Cube, London 

Alessandro Grassi, Milan (acquired directly from the above in 1993)

Thence by descent to the present owner

Prato, Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci Prato, Live! L'Arte Incontra il Rock, 2011, n.p., incorrectly illustrated in colour 

Gordon Burn and Damien Hirst, I want to spend the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always, forever, now, London 1997, p. 234, illustrated in colour

Michael Bracewell, Robert Pincus-Witten and Damien Hirst, Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings, 1986-2011, London 2013, p. 36, illustrated in colour 

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the colour is more saturated in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Extremely close inspection reveals two short, hairline cracks; one to the dark blue spot at the centre of the right hand edge and the other to the white ground of the upper left hand side of the canvas. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Damien Hirst’s Albizzin is articulated through a multichromatic grid of discs arranged in ten columns and eleven rows. The elegant counterpoint between the bright and varied palette and the rigid latticed composition, incites a shimmering visual magnetism across the canvas as different spots appear to process and recede. Albizzin was completed in 1992, the same year that Hirst started working with Jay Jopling and exhibited in the first yBa exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery. It is a pristine example of Hirst’s most epic and celebrated series, a body of work that touches upon his most important themes and motifs.

The Spot Paintings were one of Hirst’s longest standing series – he was still at Goldsmiths when he began to create works of this type and continued this inquiry right up until 2011. Known for images of a more disturbingly arresting nature, they are his most trusted idiom within a visual vocabulary that is prone to dramatic shifts and changes. Indeed, despite his more notorious work in installation and sculpture, Hirst had always wanted to be a painter. He gloried in the variation of colour, and loved his spot paintings above all for their exuberance: “The end result is always optimistic, no matter how I feel” (Gordon Brown and Damien Hirst, Eds., I want to spend the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always, forever, now, London 1997, pp. 250-51). Albizzin is then an ideal illustration of the Spot Paintings schema, its colourful composition being decidedly “optimistic”.

As well as being the title of this work, Albizzin is a chemical compound – a relative of Propanoic Acid. This title identifies the work as one of the Pharmaceutical Paintings through which Hirst constantly interrogated the boundary between art and science in an attempt to further explore the human condition. Many have interpreted the Pharmaceutical Paintings as an illustration of the proliferation of pills in modern life: just as we take our regular allocation of randomly selected pills, according to the directions of doctors and pharmacists, in the spot paintings we consume a regular and yet random dosage of colours marching across the canvas, according to the exact system and direction of the artist. Moreover, in creating this schema whereby his spot paintings are created, with its exact grid and unique circles of colour, Hirst creates a system of production with an endless plane of discovery. In then assigning arbitrarily selected chemical names, Hirst brings in a comparison with the pharmaceutical industry, which also relies on a rigid system of production, and also appears to have an endless plane of discovery; the only difference being that it purports to be based on truth.

In creating this direct comparison, Hirst expresses a fundamental frustration: “I've always been amazed at how many people believe in medicine but don't believe in art" (Damien Hirst quoted in: ibid., p. 246). By creating a pseudo-scientific system of creation, he simultaneously denigrates the authority of pharmaceuticals, and asserts the authority and importance of art. He highlights the missing link between continued discovery and continued survival whilst attempting to restore our faith in the power of painting. It is then, crucial to notice that these spots are completed by hand: just as scientists cobble chemicals together to form medicinal compounds, Hirst organises his painted dots into a pictorial structure to create his Pharmaceutical Paintings and assert not only the primacy of his craft, but his position within it.