Saturday 28 January 2012

Sat 28th Jan: NYC Galleries - Damien Hirst at Gagosian





On my last day in NYC last week I had the freakish and fantastic stroke of fate when I saw a very old friend having breakfast in the same hotel as me. Richard Toon and I were partners in crime on the fashion & textiles course at Brighton Uni and haven't seen much of each other since. Rich moved to Stockholm to work for H&M, fell in love, started a family and now head's up design at GANT. One of Rich's great fascinations is dots and spots - which has literally inspired his life with one of his daughters being named "Dot". He told me about the great Gagosian show Damien Hirst's 'The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011' happening in the city so that afternoon I headed West to check out the polka dot patterns..........
This retrospective is a simultaneous exhibition happening in across eleven Gagosian Gallery locations across the world. The works on show are all of Hirst's spot paintings, from the first spot created in 1986 up until the most recent pieces from 2011. The paintings range in size from a single half spot measuring 1.5 inches up to a painting depicting 25, 781 images, with no single colour ever repeated. The entire back catalogue has been pooled from private individuals and public institutions lending the pieces which make up the 300+ accumulated paintings. I had no idea that such a simple idea could be explored in so many different dimensions and scales. It all makes sense to me now! Some are on circular canvases, arranged in spiralling lines which give you a real disorientating experience as the spots flicker infront of you in a strange "magic eye" optical trick. I can't believe that they found enough colours from the household paint used to guarantee that no hue was repeated - astonishing! I'm sure lots of my readership know someone who has taken part in painting these works over the years at Damien's studio, so its great to have this opportunity to see them all brought together to appreciate the epic scale of the long running series...........
"I was always a colourist, Ive always had a phenomenal love of colour... I mean, I just move colour around on its own. So that's where the spot paintings came from - 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
From pinning down colour to purchasing a little DH dot pin to add to my ever-growing collection.............see above!
The exhibition opened worldwide on January 12th so I recommend taking a visit to your nearest one.........

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