Suspended in nine rows and ten columns, the ninety unique-colour circles of Althiazide comprise one of the earliest and most serene of Damien Hirst’s iconic Spot paintings. Each colour sphere is carefully individualised in hue, but together the household gloss-paint discs span the entire chromatic spectrum. This work is a key constituent of the breakthrough series that brought Hirst to international attention and garnered the artist widespread critical acclaim in the early 1990s. The present work’s execution was contemporaneous with the very first Young British Artists show as the Saatchi Gallery in 1992, which led to Hirst’s nomination that year for the coveted Turner Prize.

Hirst has long been transfixed by the life sciences. As the analysis of how substances can effect change in living organisms, pharmacology has often taken centre stage in the artist’s oeuvre. For his Spot series, each work derives its title from chemical company Sigma-Aldrich’s catalogue Biochemicals for Research and Diagnostic Reagents. A cardiovascular agent, the drug althiazide has been manufactured in combination with spironolactone under the marketed name aldactazine to treat patients with mild to moderate hypertension. When Hirst began producing his Spot cycle during the early 1990s, critic Jerry Saltz commented: “The names of these drugs conjure a vision of human misery and dread. With every drug comes a reference to a particular sickness, along with a list of side effects… These drugs form an analogue for the mysteries of the human body and its vast hermetic complexity” (Jerry Saltz, Art in America, June 1995, quoted in Damien Hirst, I want to spend the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always, forever, now, London 1997, p. 173).

Althiazide confronts humanity’s idea of faith in the unwavering progress of science, a theme that is seminal to the artist: “I can’t understand why some people believe completely in medicine but not in art, without questioning either” (Damien Hirst quoted in, Ibid, p. 24). In the context of drugs as a sacrament in the religion of “more life”, Althiazide becomes a pharmacological altarpiece. Self-restricted by the grid, the iconography of the work belies the simple schema of geometric logic, with the only element of variation present in the composition being the colour and tone of the spots which remain perennially unrelated and unidentical to one another. The strict and regulated organisation of the dots competes with the irregular rhythms of their coloured variations, teasing the eye with suggestions of patterns that ultimately do not exist in the work. The viewer’s roaming gaze is desperate to find and establish order but to no avail. These symptomatic effects of viewing Althiazide imitate the desire to organize and structure the chaos of nature with order, implicating the inevitably undermined attempts to evade death made irresistible by the life-giving rhetoric of modern science and medicine.

Hirst’s infamous preoccupation with death has proven pervasive to the artist’s career, resulting in strong and frequently-noted parallels with the work of Francis Bacon. Rooted in his obsession with mortality, Althiazide’s pharmaceutical enquiry interrogates the organization of belief systems whether they be religious, medical, or societal. Reminiscent of Roy Lichtenstein’s Pop art manipulation of Benday colour dots, the steady pulse of Althiazide’s spots in their rudimentary and regulated formation invokes mechanical reproduction. Commenting on the commodification of art via compositional strategy, Hirst simultaneously destroys this concept from the inside by creating such regularity out of unique and singularly coloured circles. Despite offering the outward characteristics of automation, Hirst’s Spot paintings fundamentally embrace the act of painting in every pristinely hand-painted dot of unique colour.