Damien Hirst
dal 7/6/2006 al 28/7/2006
Segnalato da
7/6/2006
Damien Hirst
Robert Sandelson Gallery, London
Spots, Butterflies and Cabinets. The exhibition surveys some of Hirst’s most celebrated works, focusing on spot paintings, medicine cabinets and butterfly paintings, all executed between 1997 and 2003. Hirst has continually challenged the boundaries between art, science and popular culture.
Spots, Butterflies and Cabinets
Robert Sandelson is delighted to present its first exhibition of one of the most famous artist in the world, Damien Hirst. The exhibition surveys some of Hirst’s most celebrated works, focusing on spot paintings, medicine cabinets and butterfly paintings, all executed between 1997 and 2003.
Until a few years ago Hirst and Cork Street would have made strange bedfellows but now with the reassertion of central London as a major locus for contemporary art, the match is secure - an artist showing where the giants of contemporary art have always shown for the last ninety years.
Hirst has continually challenged the boundaries between art, science and popular culture. His art is direct but never empty - it conveys a fascination with the processes of life and death. His works are meditations on the fragility of life and the inevitability of death and ensuing decay. They are also about love, and his approach is as poetic as it is analytic.
His spot paintings, the titles of which refer to pharmaceutical chemicals, are meticulously painted circles organised into neat rows. Their visual impact is immediate with their straightforward appeal of colour and form. Hirst understands art at its most simple and its most complex. He reduces painting to its basic elements, thereby eliminating the mystery attached to abstraction.
Hirst’s butterfly paintings have actual butterflies seemingly trapped on a background of monochrome gloss paint. The butterflies’ afterlife is forever fixed to be a part of one of the most exciting and challenging concepts in contemporary art today.
In his medicine cabinet pieces, Hirst displays various drugs and surgical tools on highly ordered shelves. Drugs and medicine are recurring themes in Hirst's work as means of altering perception and, like art, providing a belief system which is both seductive and illusory. The cabinets also demonstrate the applied beauty of Modernist design with their shape, colour and form, conveying a sense of elegance and luxury.
Hirst’s art is instantly identifiable as the work of a unique and provocative imagination that continues to draw in and captivate the viewer.
Robert Sandelson Gallery
5 Cork Street - London