DAMIEN HIRST Fact Paintings and Fact Sculptures April 12–May 24, 2021 Britannia Street, London Damien Hirst - Coca Cola Set - Signed Includes One Regular and One Diet Coke signed cans from the ‘Fact Paintings and Fact Sculptures’ exhibition at the Gagosian, Brittania Street, London. Both are signed by Hirst and are from the ‘Coke/Diet Coke Vending Machine (2007)’ artwork. Includes the original exhibition guide. Cans are brand new and signed however they may have slight dents, or imperfections from when they came out of the machine (once dispensed). This is part of the experience and artwork. Gagosian is pleased to announce Fact Paintings and Fact Sculptures, an exhibition of rarely seen works by Damien Hirst created between 1993 and 2021. The exhibition marks the first phase of Hirst’s yearlong takeover of the Britannia Street gallery, and is his first in the space since The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011 in 2012. Fact Paintings and Fact Sculptures sees Hirst as both artist and curator, presenting this deeply personal series of work through his own eyes. Throughout his storied career, Hirst has confronted the systems of belief that define human existence, from common trust in medicine to the seduction of consumerism. At a moment when the idea of “truth” has never been more tenuous, Hirst’s Fact Paintings and Sculptures question the obduracy of “fact” as a governing principle of society. Mimicking color photographs, the Fact Paintings are rendered in oil on canvas, sometimes with meticulous fidelity, at others reveling in the physicality of mark making. Their verisimilitude recalls the historical role of painting as a tool to represent the visible world and lead the viewer to believe that a two-dimensional image is, in fact, the three-dimensional object it portrays. With the birth of photography in the nineteenth century, painting’s relationship with reality continued to evolve. Hirst’s Fact Paintings explore this back and forth between the brush and the camera as the agents of “truth.” The first exhibition of the Fact series, The Elusive Truth, was presented at Gagosian New York in 2005 and focused on paintings derived from newspaper photographs. Other subjects include Hirst’s signature motifs of butterflies and diamonds, depictions of his own previous works, and portraits of his friends and family. In many ways, the Fact series can be seen as the artist’s self-portrait, highlighting significant moments of Hirst’s life and career: Michael with Diamond Skull (2008), for example, portrays Michael Craig-Martin—his former tutor at Goldsmiths—posing with the famed sculpture For the Love of God (2007); in Self-Portrait as Surgeon (2007) the artist, dressed in blue scrubs, stands next to a hospital bed; while Cleaning New Baby (Cyrus) (2007) depicts his own newborn son. In the Fact Sculptures, presented alongside the related paintings, Hirst moves beyond the readymade, instead constructing detailed replicas of real objects. In Love Dies Fast (2020) and Station (2014), physical elements of workshops and storage spaces appear, while in Snob (2006–20) and Public School Tosser (2006–20) he makes reference to his own iconic jewelry cabinets, wryly juxtaposed here with garbage bags and cans. Other sculptures attest to Hirst’s preoccupation with the order of things, their preservation and display: in Persil (2015) and Coke/Diet Coke Vending Machine (2007), a stacked pallet and a vending machine underscore the significance of consumer goods and product packaging, the high with the low. Some of the sculptures on view are charged with relevance to our lived experience in the current era. Remedies Against the Great Infection (2020) offers hand sanitizer and personal protective equipment, while sculptures such as Don’t Stop Me Now (2006) and Warsaw (2008), replete with medical supplies, take on new meaning within the context of the enduring pandemic. By incorporating these by-now-ubiquitous commodities into sculptures, Hirst speaks to the new landscape of material culture that has become a dark fact of contemporary life. http://damienhirst.com/biography/damien-hirst. Damien Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol and grew up in Leeds. In 1984 he moved to London, where he worked in construction before studying for a BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths college from 1986 to 1989. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1995. Since the late 1980’s, Hirst has used a varied practise of installation, sculpture, painting and drawing to explore the complex relationship between art, life and death. Explaining: “Art’s about life and it can’t really be about anything else … there isn’t anything else,” Hirst’s work investigates and challenges contemporary belief systems, and dissects the tensions and uncertainties at the heart of human experience.[1] Hirst developed his interest in exploring the “unacceptable idea” of death as a teenager in Leeds. From the age of sixteen, he made regular visits to the anatomy department of Leeds Medical School in order to make life drawings (‘With Dead Head’ (1991)). The experiences served to establish the difficulties he perceived in reconciling the idea of death in life. Of the prominence of death in his work (‘A Thousand Years’ (1990)) he has explained: “You can frighten people with death or an idea of their own mortality, or it can actually give them vigour.”[2] At Goldsmiths, Hirst’s understanding of the distinction between painting and sculpture changed significantly, and he began work on some of his most important series. The ‘Medicine Cabinets’ created in his second year combined the aesthetics of minimalism with Hirst’s observation that, “science is the new religion for many people. It’s as simple and as complicated as that really.”[3] This is one of his most enduring themes, and was most powerfully manifested in the installation work, ‘Pharmacy’ (1992). Whilst in his second year, Hirst conceived and curated ‘Freeze’ – a group exhibition in three phases. The exhibition of Goldsmiths students is commonly acknowledged to have been the launching point not only for Hirst, but for a generation of British artists. For its final phase he painted two series of coloured spots on to the warehouse walls. Hirst describes the spot paintings as a means of “pinning down the joy of colour”, and explains they provided a solution to all problems he’d previously had with colour. It has become one of the artist’s most prolific and recognisable series, and in January 2012 the works were exhibited in a show of unprecedented scale across eleven Gagosian Gallery locations worldwide.[4] In 1991 Hirst began work on ‘Natural History’, arguably his most famous series. Through preserving creatures in minimalist steel and glass tanks filled with formaldehyde solution, he intended to create a “zoo of dead animals”.[5] In 1992, the shark piece, ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ (1991) was unveiled at the Saatchi Gallery’s ‘Young British Artists I’ exhibition. The shark, described by the artist as a “thing to describe a feeling”, remains one of the most iconic symbols of modern British art and popular culture in the 90’s. The series typifies Hirst’s interest in display mechanisms. The glass boxes he employs both in ‘Natural History’ works and in vitrines, such as ‘The Acquired Inability to Escape’ (1991), act to define the artwork’s space, whilst simultaneously commenting on the “fragility of existence”.[6] Since his involvement in ‘Freeze’ in 1988, curatorial projects have remained important to the artist. In 1994 he organised the international group exhibition ‘Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away’ at the Serpentine Gallery. Over a decade later, and explaining that he considers collections to constitute a “map of a man’s life”, he curated an award-winning exhibition of work from his ‘Murderme’ collection: ‘In the darkest hour there may be light’ (2006, Serpentine Gallery). Stating: “I am absolutely not interested in tying things down”, Hirst has continued over the last decade to explore the “big issues” of “death, life, religion, beauty, science.”[7] In 2007, he unveiled the spectacular, ‘For the Love of God’ (2007): a platinum cast of a skull set with 8,601 flawless pavé-set diamonds, at the White Cube exhibition ‘Beyond Belief’. The following year, he took the unprecedented step of bypassing gallery involvement in selling 244 new works at Sotheby’s auction house in London. Describing the sale as a means of democratising the art market, the ‘Beautiful Inside My Head Forever’ auction followed Hirst’s Sotheby’s event in 2004, in which the entire contents of the artist’s restaurant venture, Pharmacy, were sold. Since 1987, over 80 solo Damien Hirst exhibitions have taken place worldwide and his work has been included in over 260 group shows. Hirst’s first major retrospective ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy’ was held in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples in 2004. His contribution to British art over the last two and a half decades was recognised in 2012 with a major retrospective of his work staged at Tate Modern. Hirst lives and works in London, Gloucestershire and Devon. [1] Damien Hirst cited in Damien Hirst, ‘I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now’ (Booth-Clibborn Editions; Reduced edition, 2005), 20–21 [2] Damien Hirst, ‘We’re Here for a Good Time, not a Long Time’, Interview with Alastair Sooke, The Telegraph, 2011 [3] Damien Hirst cited in ‘Interview’, Sean O’Hagan, New Religion, (Other Criteria/Paul Stolper Gallery, 2006). [5] Damien Hirst cited in ‘Like People, Like Flies: Damien Hirst Interviewed’, Mirta D’Argenzio, ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy: Selected Works from 1989–2004’ (Electa Napoli, 2004), 122 [6] Damien Hirst, ‘I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now’ (Booth-Clibborn Editions; Reduced edition, 2005), 33 [7] Damien Hirst cited in Damien Hirst and Gordon Burn, ‘On the Way to Work’ (Faber and Faber, 2001), 37; Damien Hirst cited in ‘Leviathan: A Conversation with Damien Hirst and John Gray’, ‘Corpus: Damien Hirst, Drawings 1981–2006’ (Other Criteria/Gagosian Gallery, 2006), 32 Please look at my other items including rare modern and contemporary art and design pieces. Thank you. |