Journey through Hirst’s dotty past
Damien Hirst is tapping into a simple fact: We all like smooth surfaces and bright colors. Since 1986, the bad boy British artist, notorious for his installations of floating animals in cases of formaldehyde, has produced about 1,500 spot paintings, white canvases covered in colorful circles. (He has an army of assistants to help him.)
Damien Hirst, “Famotidine,” 2004–2011. © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2012. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates.
Right now, Gagosian Gallery is running a multi-city exhibit of all those spots in galleries from New York to London. There are three Gagosian locations in New York alone, which means you can immerse yourself in Spotland for the whole weekend without leaving town.
And for me, at least, walking into the galleries was like walking into another country. There seemed to be light everywhere, reflecting off of the powder-white canvases and the endless pastel spots. It was dazzling. The canvases themselves are totally flat and impenetrable; stare as I might at the dots, they wouldn’t give anything back to me.
But this only reinforced my sense of foreign travel. After a while, like a tourist with a phrasebook, I picked up some hackneyed spot vocabulary and started to compare the canvases: here’s one with only four dots; here’s one where the dots are so tiny you’ll think you’re looking at computer code. I began to see unreal patterns in the white space between the dots. And by the time I walked into my second Gagosian location, I felt like an old hand, like a tourist going from one Spanish city to another.
But then, what, exactly, does this trip leave you with? Some of the paintings are, it’s true, more interesting than others. The Gagosian Madison Avenue show includes Hirst’s first spot painting, made back in 1986. The piece is wonderfully messy, dots splattering out of their neat circles and filling up almost all the white space on the canvas; the thing looks like a child’s playground. And in the same gallery, “Untitled with Black Dot” (1988) looks like a beloved old toy—the bright paint is scratched and the background is dirty, but it’s still here for us.
For the most part, though, Hirst’s spots fade into one another. The differences between paintings are only interesting while you are immersed in the show; leave and you are left with nothing. I wish that I could contradict the endless array of critics who call Hirst a cynical moneymaker, but Gagosian makes it hard. Outside the Madison Avenue location, they’ve set up a pop-up store selling mugs, T-shirts and key chains with little dots on them: A souvenir from your visit to Spotland.
Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011
Through Feb. 18, Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison Ave., 555 W. 24th St., 522 W. 21st St.,
www.gagosian.com.
