“The Spin Paintings gather and amalgamate the individuality of every individual colour, introducing a mechanical rotating movement at the moment of execution, to make the colours participate in a primordial state, where order and creation dissolve and disengage from the meditation of thought and representation, to become pure expression of the basic and vital gesture of painting and its mythology”
D amien Hirst’s Beautiful You’re Hot but Weird How Children Make Life Worth Living… from 2017 is a kaleidoscopic example from the artist’s iconic Spin Paintings series, which he creates by pouring different colors of household paint onto a rapidly rotating circular canvas. Hirst’s renowned Spin Paintings are visually arresting for their colorful kineticism achieved through the spontaneous effects of chance, as the artist’s own hand is nearly removed from the final product. The artist's approach to the present work is much like Jackson Pollock’s revolutionary drip paintings—forever altered the trajectory of painting in the 20th century—in which Pollock pioneered his drip technique by dynamically dripping and pouring skeins of paint on canvas or paper laid on the floor below him. Equally filled with dynamism and exploding with color well beyond the limits of the canvas, Hirst’s Spin Paintings draw from the uncertainty intrinsic to the human experience and symbolize the artist’s ongoing quest to push beyond preordained limits when it comes to his own artistic boundaries.
First explored in 1994, Hirst’s Spin Paintings stand in stark contrast to his formulaic Spot series yet both explore the idea of an imaginary mechanical artist for which Hirst has always provocatively achieved through his diverse oeuvre. The creation of the present work is controlled purely by Hirst’s choice of color and the dynamism captured by the motion of the rapidly spinning canvas. Hirst perfectly captures the simplicity of the series’ appeal, saying, “I really like making them. And I really like the machine, and I really like the movement. Every time they’re finished, I’m desperate to do another one” (Damien Hirst, On the Way to Work, 2001, p. 221). As with all of Hirst’s Spin Paintings, the humorously elongated title, Beautiful You’re Hot but Weird How Children Make Life Worth Living…, contains a staccato of rhythmical adjectives that mirror their chaotic facture and resultant compositions. The rich blend of yellow, green, red, and blue fill the circular piece with motion and excitement and forever preserve the highly performative moment in which Hirst captures the beautiful unpredictability of life.
