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Descriptif du lot
A mesmerising, psychedelic eruption of colour and motion, Beautiful Dirvish Spin Me Round into the Ground Painting (2007) is an exceptional work from Damien Hirst’s long-running Spin Paintings series. Almost two metres in diameter, the work features a spectacular explosion of glossy household paint cascading across a circular canvas, creating forms and patterns that seem to defy the capabilities of a conventional painting technique. Hirst marshals a spectrum of colours to create an image of mind-melting intensity. The painting’s circular form resembles an image of the Earth or a mandala, a circle used for meditation in Hinduism and Buddhism. The name of each Spin Painting begins with the word ‘beautiful’, and they are Hirst’s ode to aesthetic splendour. The ‘dirvish’ in the present work evokes the whirling dervishes, a Sufi Muslim order founded by the 13th-century poet Rumi who seek to shed their egos through a sacred, meditative spinning dance. The present work might encourage a similar state of elevation in its viewer.
Hirst first came across the technique of spin painting after watching a demonstration on the long-running children’s TV show Blue Peter. He began experimenting with the process himself in 1992 in his Brixton studio, after he had won acclaim for his formaldehyde installations exploring death and decay. The following year Hirst and fellow artist Angus Fairhurst ran a spin painting stall at an artist-run fête, dressed in clown-like costumes by the nightlife icon and performance artist Leigh Bowery. Finally, while living in Berlin in 1994, Hirst commissioned an apparatus that would allow him to execute his own large-scale spin works. A large circular canvas was laid horizontally and mechanically rotated like a vinyl record. Hirst would stand on a ladder above and pour down paint, which then flowed across the canvas through centripetal force. The technique represented a surrender of control over the final outcome of the work, in contrast to the meticulous order of Hirst’s Spot Paintings.
The Spin Paintings are both a tribute to the force and kinetics of Abstract Expressionist action painting and a rejoinder: by appropriating technology that allows anyone to make a beautiful image, he deflates the Romantic notion of the artist as a tortured genius. They also form a bridge to Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades in challenging the idea that art has to be the product solely of the human hand. ‘Here, finally,’ writes curator Eduardo Cicelyn of Hirst’s work, ‘is a legitimate heir to Marcel Duchamp, to Surrealism, and to all those artists who, over the course of this century, used aesthetics for the radical practice of subverting the bourgeois imagination’ (‘The Agony and the Ecstasy’, in Damien Hirst, exh. cat., Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples, 2004, p. 233). The present work is a kaleidoscopic celebration of vibrancy and beauty, delivered with Hirst’s unique combination of aesthetic immediacy and punkish mischief.
Hirst first came across the technique of spin painting after watching a demonstration on the long-running children’s TV show Blue Peter. He began experimenting with the process himself in 1992 in his Brixton studio, after he had won acclaim for his formaldehyde installations exploring death and decay. The following year Hirst and fellow artist Angus Fairhurst ran a spin painting stall at an artist-run fête, dressed in clown-like costumes by the nightlife icon and performance artist Leigh Bowery. Finally, while living in Berlin in 1994, Hirst commissioned an apparatus that would allow him to execute his own large-scale spin works. A large circular canvas was laid horizontally and mechanically rotated like a vinyl record. Hirst would stand on a ladder above and pour down paint, which then flowed across the canvas through centripetal force. The technique represented a surrender of control over the final outcome of the work, in contrast to the meticulous order of Hirst’s Spot Paintings.
The Spin Paintings are both a tribute to the force and kinetics of Abstract Expressionist action painting and a rejoinder: by appropriating technology that allows anyone to make a beautiful image, he deflates the Romantic notion of the artist as a tortured genius. They also form a bridge to Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades in challenging the idea that art has to be the product solely of the human hand. ‘Here, finally,’ writes curator Eduardo Cicelyn of Hirst’s work, ‘is a legitimate heir to Marcel Duchamp, to Surrealism, and to all those artists who, over the course of this century, used aesthetics for the radical practice of subverting the bourgeois imagination’ (‘The Agony and the Ecstasy’, in Damien Hirst, exh. cat., Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples, 2004, p. 233). The present work is a kaleidoscopic celebration of vibrancy and beauty, delivered with Hirst’s unique combination of aesthetic immediacy and punkish mischief.