Lot 49 A
DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Ocean Spray
Live Bidding Starts
Estimate
USD 350,000–550,000
More Information
Specialist note
"I originally wanted the Spots to look like they were painted by a human trying to paint like a machine. Colour Space is going back to the human element, so instead you have the fallibility of the human hand in the drips and inconsistencies" Damien Hirst
Across a dazzling expansive surface, Ocean Spray presents a vast sea of Technicolor dots. Impasto daubs of red, pale blue, lilac and bubble-gum pink paint seem to flutter like confetti over the white ground of the canvas. The work is one of Damien Hirst’s Colour Space paintings—a series from 2016 that represents an evolution from his seminal series of Spot paintings begun thirty years earlier. Launched in the same year as his acclaimed Veil paintings, the vibrant Colour Space works mark the artist’s enduring obsessions with chromatic maximalism, formal deconstruction, and art history. “I believe all painting and art should be uplifting for the viewer,” Hirst has said. “I love color. I feel it inside me. It gives me a buzz” (D. Hirst, I Want to Spend the Rest of my Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Forever, Now, London, 1997, p. 246).
Where Hirst’s Spot paintings can be distinguished by their hard-edge Minimalist sensibility—flat circles of color were rendered with the mathematical precision of a machine in neat, parallel rows—his Colour Space paintings relish in a new-found painterly expression. Sterile grids give way to loose and unbridled gesture, and indeed, Ocean Spray is enriched by traces of human touch. The colorful, imperfect discs of paint seem to dance across the canvas, skimming like stones and leaving accidental splatters and drips. The surface pulsates with movement, denoting an improvised and spontaneous creation that nods to the all-over canvases of Abstract Expressionist titan Jackson Pollock. Though some of the formal rules upheld by the Spots remain—no same color is repeated, and each dot is consistently sized—here, beyond an exercise in pictorial deconstruction, Hirst harnesses abstraction for its emotive capacity.
Standing before Ocean Spray and its expansive field of twinkling dots, one is reminded of late-nineteenth-century Impressionist and Post-Impressionist techniques, of warm Pointillist seascapes in Southern France by Signac and Seurat, or Monet’s dappled water garden at Giverny. Painting directly from nature—en plein air—these artists broke new ground by responding to the ever-changing effects of natural light and atmosphere. Organic daubs of color squeezed straight from the tube fractured the environment to its smallest constituent particles. Here, as is consistent across his maverick practice, Hirst too considers the very nature of perception and representation. The titles selected for the Colour Space paintings have their own double-edged significance. Terms like Ocean Spray, Reed, Morning Dew, and Black Thistle imply a poetic, figurative quality, yet are in fact derived from the generic color names for domestic house paints. Executed over a century after the French Impressionists rose to fame, in an age of digital screens and pixelated surfaces, the present work upholds the dot as “the most basic unit of creativity” (B. Gopnik, “Damien Hirst: Colour Space Paintings”, Gagosian Quarterly, 22 June 2020).
Across a dazzling expansive surface, Ocean Spray presents a vast sea of Technicolor dots. Impasto daubs of red, pale blue, lilac and bubble-gum pink paint seem to flutter like confetti over the white ground of the canvas. The work is one of Damien Hirst’s Colour Space paintings—a series from 2016 that represents an evolution from his seminal series of Spot paintings begun thirty years earlier. Launched in the same year as his acclaimed Veil paintings, the vibrant Colour Space works mark the artist’s enduring obsessions with chromatic maximalism, formal deconstruction, and art history. “I believe all painting and art should be uplifting for the viewer,” Hirst has said. “I love color. I feel it inside me. It gives me a buzz” (D. Hirst, I Want to Spend the Rest of my Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Forever, Now, London, 1997, p. 246).
Where Hirst’s Spot paintings can be distinguished by their hard-edge Minimalist sensibility—flat circles of color were rendered with the mathematical precision of a machine in neat, parallel rows—his Colour Space paintings relish in a new-found painterly expression. Sterile grids give way to loose and unbridled gesture, and indeed, Ocean Spray is enriched by traces of human touch. The colorful, imperfect discs of paint seem to dance across the canvas, skimming like stones and leaving accidental splatters and drips. The surface pulsates with movement, denoting an improvised and spontaneous creation that nods to the all-over canvases of Abstract Expressionist titan Jackson Pollock. Though some of the formal rules upheld by the Spots remain—no same color is repeated, and each dot is consistently sized—here, beyond an exercise in pictorial deconstruction, Hirst harnesses abstraction for its emotive capacity.
Standing before Ocean Spray and its expansive field of twinkling dots, one is reminded of late-nineteenth-century Impressionist and Post-Impressionist techniques, of warm Pointillist seascapes in Southern France by Signac and Seurat, or Monet’s dappled water garden at Giverny. Painting directly from nature—en plein air—these artists broke new ground by responding to the ever-changing effects of natural light and atmosphere. Organic daubs of color squeezed straight from the tube fractured the environment to its smallest constituent particles. Here, as is consistent across his maverick practice, Hirst too considers the very nature of perception and representation. The titles selected for the Colour Space paintings have their own double-edged significance. Terms like Ocean Spray, Reed, Morning Dew, and Black Thistle imply a poetic, figurative quality, yet are in fact derived from the generic color names for domestic house paints. Executed over a century after the French Impressionists rose to fame, in an age of digital screens and pixelated surfaces, the present work upholds the dot as “the most basic unit of creativity” (B. Gopnik, “Damien Hirst: Colour Space Paintings”, Gagosian Quarterly, 22 June 2020).