In the heni Art Exhibition Area of the Cultural Relics and Artworks Section of the 4th CIIE Trade in Services Exhibition Area, you can see more than ten landmark works by British artist Damien Hirst in his artistic career. These include colorful polka dots, animals that seem to freeze in time, anatomical models of pregnant women, brilliant butterfly wings and a skull studded with 8,601 diamonds. Through artistic media such as installation, sculpture, painting, etc., Hearst explores the complex and delicate relationships between art, aesthetics, religion, science, life, and death.
Damien Hirst Hirst
Born in Bristol, England in 1965, Hearst grew up in Leeds and moved to London in 1984.
In 1986-1989, while studying at the Goldsmiths School of Art, he curated the group exhibition "Freeze", which introduced a new generation of British artists. During this period, Hearst also began two core series of works—spot paintings with meticulous artistic treatment and perfect colors, and the "medicine cabinets" series, which represented his scientific and medical research.
In 1991, the "natural history" series and his most iconic work, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living— a four-meter-long tiger shark kept in a container of formaldehyde solution — propelled Hearst's work to a new climax.
In in and out of love, which he exhibited in 1991, he traced and recreated the life cycle of butterflies. Since then, he has continued to explore and return to the butterfly theme. In the kaleidoscope and mandalas collections, Hirst creates stunning works with butterfly wings, the former arranged in kaleidoscope of stained glass, and the concentric composition of the latter reminiscent of Eastern religions, both of which present the striking beauty of butterflies.
From 1994 onwards, Hirst began working on the "spin paintings" series. "Spinning Painting" emphasizes the interplay of color and kinetic potential energy, which is reminiscent of his series of "spot paintings" that focus on color and mechanics. In recent series, such as "colour space" and "veil paintings," Hearst's themes have once again returned to "the joy of color" and the relationship between color.
In 2017, Hearst released his most ambitious series to date, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable. The sculptures appear to have been excavated by underwater archaeology, and some are covered with corals and barnacles. As a result, Hearst once again broadened the possibilities and boundaries of art, and told the story of the series in the Netflix documentary of the same name.
In 2019-2020, Hirst devoted two years to the painting "cherry blossoms", a series that emphasizes the action of painting depicting cherry trees with flowers in full bloom. These massive canvases are covered in intense, bright colors, enveloping the viewer in a vast landscape that blurs the boundaries of abstraction and figuration. They, Hearst says, "are about beauty, life and death... It's also about desires and how we deal with relationships with the things around us, and how we change them, but at the same time crazy visual transients of beauty."
Damien Hirst
I Always Belong to You Me for You Forever, 2014
213.4 x 213.4 cm
Materials: cloth, butterfly and household gloss paint
Butterflies are one of Damien Hirst's most important themes. In 1989, he found a fly trapped in a primed oil-painted bristle in his studio in brixton, a suburb of south London, and has been working around insects ever since. Inspired by this scene, Damien Hirst hopes to create works that are aesthetically pleasing. So he pinned the butterflies to a solid-colored canvas painted with glossy paint, explaining that he did so because he wanted them to "look like an accident where butterflies were stuck to the paint."
As in Heaven as it is in heaven, 2015
120.9 x 180.5 x 12 cm
Glass, stainless steel, steel, aluminum, nickel, propylene, polymerized foam and insect specimens
版权：photographed by prudence cuming associates
damien hirst and science ltd. all rights reserved, dacs 2021
Damien Hirst's showcase runs through the different series of works. He filled the shelves with objects — from cigarettes to precious stones to fish suspended in a solution of formaldehyde. The arrangement of the objects is inspired by the minimalist forms of Sol Lewitt and Donald Judd, a solemn arrangement reminiscent of a hunting cabinet.
Part of the work
In the Entomological Showcase, Hearst arranges butterflies with a wide variety of colorful insects and spiders. For the artist, they symbolize the fragility of life while retaining colorful beauty in the state of death. These orderly arrangements are reminiscent of a rigorous order. But a closer look reveals that order has been disrupted by some subtle changes.
Hexamethonium bromide, 2017
175.3x 261.6 cm
Cloth surface, household gloss paint
Spot paintings are one of Hirst's most widely known series, with 13 sub-series. These "polka dot paintings" vary in size. Their titles are taken from a book discovered by Damien Hirst by accident in the early 1990s, Sigma-Aldrich's Biochemicals for Research and Diagnostic Reagents.
Of the 13 sub-series, "pharmaceutical paintings" were the earliest and most numerous. The regular grid form is the basis of this series, and the random and infinite combination of colors is the most important part of the work.
Cyclohexanol, 2019
132.1 x 91.4 cm
版权：photographed by prudence cuming associates ? damien hirst and science ltd. all rights reserved, dacs 2021
This "Cyclohexanol" is one of a group of works named after deuterium compounds. Created since 1992, this group also belongs to Damien Hirst's "Spot Paintings" series.
For his series of wave-point paintings, Damien Hirst once said: "Mathematically, through these wave-point paintings, I may have found something fundamental and important that exists in any art—the independent colors interact harmoniously with other colors in a perfect form." He says that any problems he had with color before were eliminated by the perfectly arranged, complementary, but never-repetitive colors in polka dot painting.
Courtesy of Heyi Art
Editor: Zhou Minxian
General: FTZ Art FTZ