Damien Hirst

Jay Jopling, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1993

Prague, Praguebiennale 3, 2007, illustrated in colour

Damien Hirst and Robert Violette, Eds., I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, London 1997, p. 236, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Upon extremely close inspection, there is a minute protrusion towards the lower left hand corner in the light green spot, with a tiny associated crack, two fine minute drying cracks towards the top right hand corner and a further short vertical hairline crack at the centre of the right edge. A tiny pin-head sized spot of loss is visible on close inspection towards the top right corner on the right extreme edge. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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"Imagine a world of spots. Everytime I do a painting a square is cut out. They regenerate. They're all connected."

Damien Hirst and Robert Violette, Eds., I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, London 1997, pp. 248-249

 

"The end result is always optimistic, no matter how I feel."

Damien Hirst and Robert Violette, Eds., I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, London 1997, pp. 250-251

Suspended in nine rows and ten columns, the ninety unique colour circles of Amyloglucosidase comprise one of the earliest and most beautiful of Damien Hirst's iconic Spot paintings. Each dot is unique in colour, and taken together, they comprise the whole chromatic field. A work of fundamental importance for the development of the Spot series, as well as for the wider development of his oeuvre, Amyloglucosidase was executed in 1993. The previous year Hirst's work had been included in the seminal 'Young British Artists' show at the Saatchi Gallery, and in 1994 he was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize. Amyloglucosidase is therefore not only supremely elegant, exquisitely made, rare and thematically complex, but also of major historical importance.

Hirst has long been transfixed by the life sciences and in pharmacology in particular, for its analysis of how man-made and natural substances effect change in living organisms. Amyloglucosidase is a digestive enzyme which is can be manufactured and used for industrial purposes. It catalyses the breakdown of corn syrups into glucose, a cheaper manufacturing alternative to natural sugar, and is a key example of a naturally occurring compound which can be chemically-engineered to create a synthetic version. For Hirst, mass-produced drugs have become an everyday crutch, an omnipresent transformer of Nature; their creation has become a human passion, with scientists striving to find ways to cure disease and prolong life. The spot paintings, known collectively as the Pharmaceutical Paintings, seem to confront humanity's idea of faith in the steadfast advancement of science, a theme of utmost importance to the artist: "I can't understand why some people believe completely in medicine but not in art, without questioning either" (the artist cited in: I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, London 1997, p. 24). In Amyloglucosidase, the panoply of coloured spots symbolise the myriad pills and palliatives that mankind has developed to treat disease and extend life.

The composition of the Spot paintings is the simple schema of geometric logic. Self-restricted by a grid, it is impossible for Hirst to imbue the work with any emotive content: the only variation is the colour and tone of the spots, which, according to Hirst's formula, must remain completely unique and unrelated. The strict organisation of the coloured dots competes with the rhythms of their variations, encouraging the eye to find patterns. The viewer's roaming focus is desperate to find order within the confined space. This is symptomatic of the human desire to organise and categorise – to structure the chaos of Nature with harmony. Ultimately this contributes to the inevitably undermined attempt to evade death. By positing the spectator as an unwitting participant in our global paranoia of death, Hirst implicates the irresistible attraction of life-giving inherent to modern science.

Hirst's profound engagement with themes of the cycle of life and inevitability of mortality forms the nucleus of his best work. Embedded in his fascination with death, Amyloglucosidase's pharmaceutical enquiry interrogates the organisation of belief systems. Presuming nothing, Hirst's questioning has been ceaseless: 'Legal drugs are much more frightening than the illegal kind' (Hirst interviewed by Stuart Morgan in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Gagosian Gallery, Damien Hirst: No Sense of Absolute Corruption, 1996, p. 10). However, despite its outward characteristics of automation, Amyloglucosidase still fundamentally embraces the act of painting: everyday household gloss has been skilfully applied to create a sublimely luxuriant surface. The cheerful simplicity of the varied colours belies the complex philosophical ideas which underpin this work, ideas which query established faith structures and man's intrinsic transience. Hirst's aim is to motivate the audience to think about the terms of their existence by exploring the antithetical faculties of science and art. In a pseudo-deification of medicine, he taps into our blind credence in the curative powers of industrially synthesised drugs, presenting an art work which questions the ordained cycle of life through a composition of unashamed beauty.