Tag Archives: hirst

Work of the Week! WOW! Damien Hirst – Mickey and Minnie Mouse

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Damien Hirst
Mickey & Minnie
2016
Silkscreen and glitter
Available in the following sizes:
34 1/2 x 27 1/2 in. each
Edition of 150
60 x 48 1/4 in. each
Edition of 50
Pencil signed and numbered on verso

About the work:

Mickey and Minnie Mouse are probably the most iconic duo of Pop culture. Developed as the official mascot of the Walt Disney Company, in the 1920’s, Mickey’s celebrated status and universal appeal has inspired many artists to depict his likeness, very few however, have also created Minnie.

This week’s Work of the Week! WOW! are Mickey and Minnie by Damien Hirst.

The key defining factors of both Mickey and Minnie Mouse are the three circles that form their head and ears. It seems only fitting then, that the Walt Disney Company would approach Damien Hirst, widely known for his spot paintings, to create his own take on the beloved characters.

Hirst initially painted Mickey in household gloss on canvas in 2012, with a white background, auctioned at Christies to raise money for Kids Company, a children’s charity. The work sold for close to 1 Million Pounds and led to the creation of “blue glitter” Mickey and “pink glitter” Minnie.

Both figures are created solely by the use of circles, striking compositions reducing the mischievous mice to their basic elements, capturing their essence through shape and color. Even in their reductive states, Mickey and Minnie are such powerful icons that they remain highly identifiable and universally recognized. Mickey only required 12 spots and Minnie 19, attesting to the power of Hirst’s style and composition.

Both pieces are entirely covered in glitter which enhances the timeless star-power of the enduring and beloved personalities of Mickey and Minnie.

WOW! – Work of the Week – Damien Hirst – Ala-Met

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Damein Hirst
Ala-Met
2011
Woodcut
31 1/2 x 25 in.
Edition of 55
Pencil signed and numbered

About the work:

“To create that structure, to do those colours, and do nothing. I suddenly got what I wanted. It was just a way of pinning down the joy of colour.”

Damien Hirst started his ‘Pharmaceutical’ spot painting series in 1986, when he painted two almost identical arrangements of colored spots on the wall of his warehouse. Today, the spot works are amongst his most widely recognized pieces.

The spot series follows a formula. Every work is created without any physical evidence of human intervention, appearing to be constructed mechanically. Each color is unique, never repeated and complimentary to the surrounding ones. The formula of the spot paintings also dictates that the spaces between the spots are always equal to the diameter of the spots themselves. Hirst explains that, “mathematically, with the spot paintings, I probably discovered the most fundamentally important thing in any kind of art. Which is the harmony of where colour can exist on its own, interacting with other colours in a perfect format.”

The titles for the works also follow a specification, and are taken from the chemical company Sigma-Aldrich’s catalogue ‘Biochemicals for Research and Diagnostic Reagents.’

This week’s Work of the Week! WOW! is Ala-Met.

The name for Ala-Met is derived from two amino acids, Alanine and Methionine, organic compounds that participate in a number of processes such as neurotransmitter transport and biosynthesis.

Although created in the deceptively simple polk-dot motif, the work is hypnotic and disorienting, inducing the sort of hazy effects one might get from powerful mind and body altering pharmaceutical substances. Some colors seem to jump out from the white background, while others recede, highlighting Hirst’s expert control of color.

Ala-Met is also faithful to the mechanical and detached appearance of the spot paintings, despite that it is a work created by woodcut. The woodcut is a relief printing technique, in which a block of wood is carved along the woodgrain. This technique typically leaves woodgrain marks on the printed product, whereas Ala-Met achieves a uniform and seamless finish in each spot.

Throughout his body of work, Hirst has demonstrated a fascination with mortality. His work calls into question our awareness and convictions about the boundaries that separate desire and fear, life and death, reason and faith, love and hate. Hirst uses the tools and iconography of science and religion, creating works of art whose beauty and intensity offer the viewer insight into art that transcends our familiar understanding of those domains.

The spot paintings, with their titles tied to the pharmaceutical industry play on the fact that we have become a drug induced society, yet at the same time these paintings speak volumes about the art itself, as a work of art. Hirst’s work is post expressionism. “I wanted to find a way to use colour in paintings that wasn’t expressionism.” However Hirst does use color and the placement of these colors to express certain ideas or emotions. Each spot painting will have a different meaning or feeling to each viewer coming from different cultures, with a whole different set of life experiences.

Damien Hirst has often been a polarizing figure in the art world. His often provokes outrage as well as mystified shrugs. In addition to keeping up with the Warholian tradition of repetitive, consistent images, the spot artworks bring up cultural and contemporary questions. Upon seeing these spot paintings, the lay person will ask “Is that art?” or “That painting cost that much for spots?” This was also said about Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can paintings. Time has proven the importance of the Campbell’s Soup Can painting to the art world, as will Hirst’s Spot paintings.

WOW – Work Of the Week – Damien Hirst “Methyl Phenylsufoxide”

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Methyl Phenylsulfoxide

DAMIEN HIRST
Methyl Phenylsufoxide
2010
Woodcut
41 x 64 in.
Artist’s Proof (A.P.)
Signed and numbered

About This Work:

“There are four important things in life: religion, love, art and science. Of them all, science seems to be the one right now. Like religion, it provides the glimmer of hope that maybe it will be all right in the end” – Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst has become one of the most prominent artists of our times.
Many of his works are widely recognized, from the shark suspended in formaldehyde, The Physical Impossibility Of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living, to later works such as the diamond skull For The Love Of God.

Throughout his work, Hirst investigates and challenges contemporary belief systems, and dissects the tensions and uncertainties at the heart of human experience. Hirst explores the complex relationship between art, life, death and religion. His work calls into question our awareness and convictions about the boundaries that separate desire and fear, reason and faith, love and hate.

Methyl Phenylsufoxide is part of the spots series.
The spot artworks are all named after synthetic and natural compounds in drugs and pharmaceuticals. Their titles are taken from the chemical company Sigma-Aldrich’s catalogue Biochemicals for Research and Diagnostic Reagents, a book Hirst stumbled across in the early 1990’s.
Methyl Phenylsufoxide is an important pharmaceutical intermediate, used in a variety of chemical processes.

The idea behind this work is completely based on color. Hirst studied color theory as every art student does. Color theory began in the 18th century with Issac Newton, who came up with a practical guidance to color mixing and the visual effects of a specific color combination. Hirst applies Newton’s theory of color to the spots and pairs them with the effect of the specific drug, by arranging the colors in a well calculated pattern and combination. The result is that, when viewed, the viewer subconsciously feels like he/she would feel if he/she took that specific drug.

Hirst explains that “…mathematically, with the spot paintings, I probably discovered the most fundamentally important thing in any kind of art. Which is the harmony of where color can exist on its own, interacting with other colors in a perfect format”.

Hirst’s spots are amongst his most widely recognized works, with the Pharmaceutical Series being the first and most prolific of the 13 spots sub-series.
There are over 1000 in existence, dating from 1986 to 2011. The very first spot work on canvas is Untitled (with Black Dot) – the only Pharmaceutical painting ever to have incorporated a black dot. The spots artworks also vary in size from a 40 foot work containing spots of 1 inch, (Iodomethane- 13c) to L-Isoleucinol, which measures 10 x 16 inches and contains 25,781 one millimeter spots.

After having started with paintings, Hirst slowly refined his creative process. Any physical evidence of human intervention – such as the compass point left at the centre of each spot – was removed, until the works appeared to have been constructed mechanically. This is the reason why the printing process suits the spots even better than the painting technique.

It is pretty incredible how the images of the spots seem so simple, at the same time representing the product of such complex artistic concept and study.

In 2012, Gagosian gallery exhibited over 300 spot paintings in all their 13 galleries worldwide. The artist explained that the idea of an installation of multiple spot paintings, “it’s an assault on your senses. They grab hold of you and give you a good shaking. As adults, we’re not used to it. It’s an amazing fact that all objects leap beyond their own dimension”.

Opening Night at Art Aspen 2015

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Gregg Shienbaum Fine Art is happy to announce a great opening night at Art Aspen 2015
The show will be open August 13th through August 16th
Come visit us at Booth B16

Art Aspen

 

Gregg Shienbaum Fine Art Booth B16 exhibiting at Art Aspen 2015

Gregg Shienbaum Fine Art Booth B16 exhibiting at Art Aspen 2015

 

Opening night at Art Aspen 2015

Opening night at Art Aspen 2015


 

 

WOW! – Work of the Week 7/13/15

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Damien Hirst, Methylamine-13c

Damien Hirst Methylamine-13c 2014

Damien Hirst Methylamine-13c 2014

Damien Hirst
Methylamine-13c
2014
Screenprint with glaze and diamond dust
33 1/16 x 27 in.
Edition of 100
This piece is signed and numbered in pencil on verso.

About This Work:

Hirst’s spot paintings and prints are amongst his most widely recognized works, with the ‘Pharmaceutical’ paintings first and most prolific of the 13 spots sub-series.

His work with spots, specifically when named after synthetic and natural compounds in drugs and pharmaceuticals, explores themes fundamental to the his work. Namely the complex relationships between nature and science, myth and reality, art and beauty, and life and death.

No one color spot is the same color as another. The colors he uses in conjunction with drug and pharmaceutical titles suggests they represent different emotions/states e.g. red means love, white means purity, black means death, blue means the blues, green means jealousy. Alluding to that fact, that all human emotions or sensations or natural science can be expressed, aesthetically, in the spots.

About Damien Hirst:

Damien Hirst has become one of the most prominent artists of his generation. Many of his works are widely recognized, from the shark suspended in formaldehyde, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”, and his spot, spin and butterfly paintings, through to later works such as the diamond skull “For the Love of God”.

Throughout his work, Hirst investigates and challenges contemporary belief systems, and dissects the tensions and uncertainties at the heart of human experience.  Hirst takes a direct approach to ideas about existence, exploring the complex relationship between art, life, death and religion. His work calls into question our awareness and convictions about the boundaries that separate desire and fear, reason and faith, love and hate.

By using the tools and iconography of science and religion, he blurs the lines between science, religion, and art, giving the viewer the horror of immortality and the brilliance of reality. 

Death is a central theme in Hirst’s art work.  He gives his audience an open mouth astonishment while challenging the viewer to confront the inevitability of existence. He became famous for a series of artworks in which dead animals (including a shark, a sheep and a cow) are preserved—sometimes having been dissected—in formaldehyde. The best known of these being The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a 14-foot tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde in a vitrine. 

In September 2008, he took an unprecedented move for a living artist by selling a complete show, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, at Sotheby’s by auction and by-passing his long-standing galleries.  The auction exceeded all predictions, raising $198 million, breaking the record for a one-artist auction.

Since 1987, over 80 solo shows of Damien Hirst exhibitions have taken place worldwide, and his work has been included in over 260 group shows.  His contributions to art over the last two and a half decades was recognized in 2012 with a major retrospective of his work at the Tate Modern.