calendario eventi  :: 

X

16/4/2003

Damien Hirst

The Saatchi Gallery, London

Hirst is the alpha-male of contemporary British art. Through his sculptures, installations, paintings, and films, Hirst is constantly re-examining the beauty and poetry in death. Though his work often has a 'hands-off' manufactured aesthetic, Hirst approaches his grandiose subjects with the humility of a man questioning his own existence. He presents a higher truth understood through the mortal limitations of fear, religion, fatalism, awe and humour.
Hymn

Twenty feet tall, Hymn is a mondo enlargement of Hirst's son's plastic anatomical toy, looming stupid and frightening like the educational tool which ate New York. It's this bad-sci-fi movie aspect which marks a new turn in his work: Hirst the joker. Hymn is like the Wizard of Oz - a makeshift precious bronze god-idol with all its guts exposed.
Untitled

Oozing with sickly chocolate-box sweetness, Hirst's Untitled is like a big gushy valentine from a psychotic boyfriend. The heart-shaped canvas, poured thick with saccharine pink paint, is a sticky, devouring love trap, a giant fly-strip collection of the corpses of dozens of beautiful butterflies.
Holidays/No Feelings

A pill is perfect in form, infinitely impersonal, a non-negotiable power promising a little-longer life. It's a cold-comfort bargain which will default on its contract in the end. Hirst's medicine cabinets offer the first glimpses into his rationalising of sculpture with painting, and philosophy with pop. The impartial ambience of science merges with a more aesthetic reading: the purity of the design of the pills, the clean colour fields of the geometric packaging, the graceful harmony of the text on the labels. Hirst's remedies offer the same comfort as Warhol's soup cans.
Spot Mini

Hirst’s trademark pharmaceutical spots, like 60s hippy icons, adorn a Michael Caine -nostalgia mini. It’s a tribute to everything British, as adored and finalised as a time capsule.
Argininosuccinic Acid

Hirst's spot paintings are the most pop expression of his work. These groovy polka-dot patterns are a symbol of sixties Brit-lore. Candy-coloured little circles, like mind-expanding tablets, a child-targeted advertisement for self-destructive drug culture and corporate pharmaceutical evils. Their unpronounceable chemical titles indicate Hirst is in the know: the big-daddy pusher of the fun side of death.
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living

A seventeen-foot Australian tiger shark is suspended in a glass tank filled with formaldehyde, its predatory viciousness just inches from grasp. Fantastically animate, its frigid stillness is shockingly incomprehensible. Sleek, potent, powerful, corporate: it's a trophy of masculine vitality. Hirst presents a Hemingwayesque bravado, the untamed quest of Santiago captured and put on spectacle in a tank.
Away From The Flock

Dead animals in tanks filled with formaldehyde, Hirst's sculptures are ready-made still lifes. It's art that actually is nature. A real beast framed is a perfect naturalist representation, surpassing in purity any realistic painting, sculpture or photo. Since their debut in the early nineties Hirst's animals have prompted questions of morality and ethics. Hirst addresses these issues in the sculptures themselves; their subjects are often allegorical to religious, folklore, and social values. Hirst's animals become the preserved remains of martyrs - like the Capuchin monks of Rome, Pompeii victims, even Lenin - displayed for the reminder of greater lessons learned. Away From The Flock is an angelically white sheep with pristine fragility, bringing to mind the biblical parable of the lost lamb, and the value of protecting the weak and innocent. Hirst unfortunately translates 'saving' as 'preserving'. In real life wee lambs get eaten by wolves.
Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything

A cow and a steer are sliced into six pieces each. Mounted in twelve vertical tanks, they are presented in a line, their segments shuffled to create one long, impossible animal facing two directions at once. Hirst presents a physical and spiritual union between partners, a desperate isolation in their merger.
This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home

The pig is sliced down the middle, displayed in two separate tanks. Driven on a plinth by motorised pulleys, this dumb animal constantly passes itself in the endless shuffle, a parody of the futile rat race of life.
Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same Direction for the Purpose of Understanding

Individually cased, Hirst's fish swim blindly in the same direction without interaction. It's a cold and clinical metaphor for a society without conflict. A utopian ideal of a harmony that comes at an unthinkable cost of sameness and emotional confinement.
Love Lost

Like still-life paintings where food and items of luxury are painted as a symbol of the transience of life, Hirst's tanks are also memento mori. In Love Lost, a computer sits on a desk. But this is no ordinary office workstation: the chair is exchanged for a gynaecologist's examination seat. On the desk is an empty coffee cup and a watch, referencing the rat race of life and the slow passing of time. Love Lost, however, is also a giant aquarium: filled to the top with water, large silver fish swim about in an elation of final rest.
Horror at Home

Hirst’s giant ashtray references big minimalist sculpture: clean, white, perfect in form. Containing the remains of hundreds of fag packs, this sculpture also reads as a party aftermath. Each cigarette butt is like a tiny portrait, tributes to the passing of time, three tobacco consumed inches closer to the smokers’ deaths. Hirst presents an object of beauty and disgust, a compelling and attractive deadly habit.
The Last Supper

The Last Supper is a series of 13 poster-prints of giant medical labels – with traditional British home comfort foods replacing the expected pharmaceutical elements. With Cornish Pasties and Sausages standing in for Peter, Paul and the lot, Hirst’s The Last Supper is a post modern icon for an entire country dedicated to its notoriously stodgy heart-attack inducing cuisine.
Contemplating a Self Portrait (as a Pharmacist)

In Contemplating a Self Portrait (as a Pharmacist), Hirst symbolically encases the idea of himself like one of his animals. The scene ? a set of a traditional artist’s studio ? is set permanently curated behind glass. An idealised role, perfectly preserved, with all of its limitations and inevitable futility.
A Thousand Years

A Thousand Years is a universe under scrutiny. Breeding a colony of flies from scratch, maggots can be watched feeding on a severed cow’s head, turning into flies, only to have their miraculous metamorphosis prematurely terminated by their inevitable contact with the insect-o-cutor. Hirst’s flies are a crude parody of the life-cycle of man – a cruel joke played out in microcosm.
Beautiful, kiss my fucking ass painting
Beautiful, cheap, shitty, too easy ...

Hirst’s spin paintings are made from dropping canisters of paint onto a fast spinning canvas laid horizontally. It’s a simple technique learned from children’s television – a guaranteed masterpiece every time, art so easy anyone can do it. In Beautiful Kiss My Fucking Ass …Hirst presents his disc painting in traditional style, like a high-speed Pollock with frozen velocity. In Beautiful, cheap, shitty, too easy ... the canvas is mounted on a rotating propeller, an action painting in perpetual motion, like a giant kaleidoscope, or a traditional painting operating in the same way as simple flip-book animation.
Zeolite Mixture

Hirst’s spot paintings are the most pop expression of his work. These groovy polka dot patterns are a symbol of 60s Brit-lore. Candy-coloured little circles, like mind-expanding tablets, a child-targeted advertisement for self-destructive drug culture and corporate pharmaceutical evils. Their unpronounceable chemical titles indicate Hirst is in the know: the big-daddy pusher of the fun side of death.

Text by Patricia Ellis


The Saatchi Gallery
County Hall
Southbank, London SE1 7PB

stampa

permanent link