Executed in 1995, the same year that Damien Hirst won the Turner Prize for his iconic sculpture Mother and Child Divided, Benzoin is an immaculate example of Damien Hirst's iconic corpus of Spot Paintings. Perhaps Hirst’s most iconic and archetypal series, the Spot Paintings comprise nearly 1,400 works on canvas, the titles of which are taken from the Sigma-Aldrich Catalogue of Chemical Compounds. The series was first conceived alongside the Medicine Cabinets in the early 1990s and first exhibited in the legendary 1988 Freeze exhibition. As one of the thirteen sub-series within the Spot painting category, the Pharmaceutical paintings remains the first and most prolific. Tantalisingly and deceptively saccharine in appearance, the present work is imbued with an underlying gravitas, poignantly undercut by its compelling, vibrant and cheerful aesthetic.

When these works were first produced, the 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’, 1995, 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). Drugs have become the ubiquitous modifier of Nature: the remit of human existence is continually conditioned by the powers of modern science, from pre-birth sedatives dealt through the placenta, to near-death stimulants fed through an intravenous drip. Overshadowed by an idiosyncratic obsession with mortal transience, Benzoin reminds the viewer that despite our desire for order and harmony, we ultimately have no control over our destiny

Each Spot painting shares a certain set of properties: the spots are arranged on a grid made invisible by a white or off-white background; no two spots on a given work touch each other; and no hue is ever repeated on the same work. Hirst has stated 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 colours in a perfect format” (Damien Hirst quoted in: Damien Hirst and Gordon Burn, On the Way to Work, London 2001, p. 120). Optically alluring and meticulously composed, the controlled emotionless self-restriction of Hirst's candy-coloured Benzoin crafts a captivating viewing experience.