Damien Hirst

White Cube, London

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2002

New York, Gagosian Gallery (West 24^th Street), Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011, January - February 2012

Jason Beard and Millicent Wilner, Eds., Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings, 1986-2011, London 2013, p. 235, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly deeper and richer in the original. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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Resting upon a colossal circular plane, coloured discs radiate out from a central point in Damien Hirst’s ZDP. Rare in format within the greater body of Hirst’s iconic Spot Paintings – there are only 39 circular canvases within the 1,365 paintings in the series as a whole – this work is a mesmerising and kaleidoscopic example. Although conceived as an ‘infinite’ series in 1988, Hirst drew a line under these works in 2011 when he began compiling The Complete Spot Paintings catalogue raisonné. To celebrate the end of an era and the publication of this book, Gagosian Gallery held an ambitious schedule of simultaneous exhibitions across each of their eleven international locations. Shown at Gagosian’s West 24^th Street gallery – one of Gagosian’s three locations in New York – the present work possesses an historic exhibition history having been shown among the most representative paintings from this historic body of work.

The Spot Paintings vary dramatically in size, format, and diameter of coloured discs. Ranging from 1mm through to 60 inches across, and painted on varying sized and shaped canvas supports, these works have become utterly synonymous with Damien Hirst’s artistic practice. The concentric composition of ZDP imparts a mesmerising effect; our eye jumps from circle to circle through reverberating rings of spots. In a statement that utterly encapsulates an experience of the present work, Hirst described his Spot Paintings as “an assault on your senses. They grab hold of you and give you a good shaking. As adults, we’re not used to it” (Damien Hirst cited in: Damien Hirst and Gordon Burn, Eds., On the Way to Work, London 2001, p. 220).

First exhibited in the legendary 1988 Freeze exhibition, which was held in an empty Port Authority building in London’s Docklands, the Spot Paintings touch upon the core conceptual cornerstones of Hirst's oeuvre: science, religion, and death. Named after pharmaceutical chemicals, compounds, and readily available prescription drugs, these paintings present a jubilant minimalist commentary on the seductive and palliative role of modern medicine. Commenting on the series, Hirst remarked: "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... Art is like medicine, it can heal" (Damien Hirst cited in: ibid.). The title of the present work, ZDP, is the abbreviation for Zhibai Dihuang Pill, a traditional Chinese medicine used to treat kidney deficiency, whose side effects and effectiveness are still uncertain in the Western scientific community.

Rational, medicinal, and forensic, Hirst's Spot Paintings are an aesthetic transmutation of the life-giving promise of modern science. Channeling Humanity’s obsession with science’s guarantee of health and long-life through a seemingly endless and clinical grid of candy-coloured spots, Hirst touches upon the core belief-system of an atheistic age devoid of spiritual sublimation. The clinical and rational structure of the present work is imbued with a sense of discipline and formal consistency that mimics scientific analysis, and yet, these ordered spots are entrenched within an artistic heritage of modernist formalism and American Minimalism. Thus, by fusing modernist abstraction with the optimism of modern medicine, Hirst’s Spot Paintings restore a sense of comfort and assurance once provided by art in its role as religious conduit.