Beschreibung:

20 Damien Hirst Untitled 2 (Spot Painting) 1992 household gloss on canvas 91.4 x 91.4 cm (35 7/8 x 35 7/8 in) Signed ‘Damien Hirst’ on the reverse.
Provenance Acquired directly from the artist Private Collection, Transylvania Christie’s London, ‘Sale of Post-War and Contemporary Art’, 5 February 2004, lot 217 Acquired from the above sale by the present owner Exhibited New York, Gagosian Gallery, The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011, 12 January–18 February 2012 Catalogue Essay From curating the exhibition Freeze in 1988 and establishing the solo auction of his own work Beautiful Inside My Head Forever in 2008, all the way to his major Tate Modern retrospective in 2012, Damien Hirst has become one of the most influential artists of his generation. Hirst’s talent for being an entrepreneur is undoubtedly a large part of his success. Like many of the artists that today are associated with the YBAs (Young Brutish Artists), Hirst started out his highly successful career as a graduate of Goldsmiths College in London in the late 1980s. During Hirst’s second year at Goldsmiths, he assembled his first Medicine Cabinet Sinner (1988). The cabinet marked a time when Hirst wanted to paint but was unable to produce anything decent. “… in painting I’d get lost: I had no formal devices to help me out. One problem I always had was colour” (Damien Hirst exh. cat., London, Tate, 2012, p. 93). Hirst began to compose the cabinets in a painterly manner by selecting the medicine boxes for their colour and size. The advantage of the cabinet shelves was that they imposed a structure to the artwork that gave Hirst the necessary formal tool. It was only shortly after the first Medicine Cabinet that Hirst painted the first of what must be one of the most widely recognized works in contemporary art today – his Spot Paintings. The set layout of the spots followed exactly the same notion of structure as the Cabinets; however, now Hirst could not hide the fact that he was arranging colour anymore. He committed fully to paintings in the way that it now was all about colour and composition. As Hirst has said about the Spot Paintings, “I just wanted things that were irresistible, things that you couldn’t ignore, things that you couldn’t avoid and you couldn’t challenge” (Damien Hirst 2012, p. 92). Indeed, Hirst had created something utterly provocative and unavoidable with his vibrant Spots. “Yeah, the first [Spot Painting] on canvas absolutely changed my world. I’d looked at this stuff, like Conceptual art, but it was the first time I had clarity in some way. The thing that was causing me problems in painting was colour, finding a structure where I could lay it down, be in control of it rather than it controlling me. Once I’d done that, I didn’t really have problems with colour anymore.” (Damien Hirst 2012, p. 91) At the time of the first Spot Paintings, Hirst was looking at Minimalism. He was intrigued by these minimal forms because they also were unavoidable and at the same time deeply irresistible. “I was totally into Minimalism probably before I was into Conceptual art – Donald Judd and Sol Lewitt and all those guys. I loved Minimalism because it was everything I wasn’t as a human being …” (Damien Hirst 2012, p. 93). But soon he became bored and then even frustrated by the meaningless of Minimalism; Damien’s response were the Spot Paintings. In early 2012, Hirst exhibited over 300 Spot Paintings at once across all of Gagosian Gallery’s eleven locations worldwide. Spanning 25 years, The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011 fulfilled the artist’s long-standing dream to show all the Spots simultaneously. Read More Artist Bio Damien Hirst British • 1965 There is no other contemporary artist as maverick to the art market as Damien Hirst Foremost among the Young British Artists (YBAs), a group of provocative artists who graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London in the late 1980s, Hirst ascended to stardom by making objects that shocked and appalled, and that possessed conceptual depth in both profound and prankish ways. Regarded as Britain's most notorious living artist, Hirst has studded human skull