Damien Hirst

Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills
Private Collection, Los Angeles
Sale: Sotheby's, New York, Contemporary Art, 10 November 2010, Lot 350
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Some light wear is visible to both extreme lower corner tips. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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The cellular kaleidoscopic field of Hydroquinone is an immaculate example from Damien Hirst's iconic corpus of Spot Paintings. Inaugurated in the late 1980s, Hirst began these works as an endless series of infinite chromatic permutations. With no one colour the same across often vast fields of clinically immaculate coloured discs, these works at once evoke Gerhard Richter’s Colour Charts or Ellsworth Kelly’s minimalist grids, and yet are conceptually underpinned by scrutinising the comforting reassurance of science and medicine in our everyday lives. As articulated by Hirst in 1997: "I started them as an endless series … a scientific approach to painting in a similar way to the drug companies' scientific approach to life. Art doesn't purport to have all the answers; the drug companies do. Hence the title of the series, The Pharmaceutical Paintings, and the individual titles of the paintings themselves: Acetaldehyde (1991), Albumin Human Glycated (1992), Androstanolone (1993), Arabinitol (1994) etc... Art is like medicine – it can heal. Yet I’ve always been amazed at how many people believe in medicine but don’t believe in art, without questioning either…” (the artist quoted in: Gordon Burn and Damien Hirst, I want to spend the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always, forever, now, London 1997, p. 246).

Identified by Hirst as the defining belief-system of our contemporary age, science occupies a position of authority to rival that of religion. By infusing his art with the clinical sterility and significatory reassurance of pharmaceutical products, Hirst substitutes the role of religion as reassurance against death and the afterlife with the empirically confident aesthetic and placation of pharmacology. First conceived alongside the early Medicine Cabinets, Hirst's Spot Paintings are imbued with the same measured rational order and pleasing formal cogency of his pharmacy store vitrines. By scrutinising yet adopting this iconography Hirst restores to art the miraculous function it once provided to a populous for which religion once played a similar role. As illustrated by the way Hirst speaks of their production, the comforting and systematic appearance of these ordered candy-coloured spots imparts a palliative psychoactive effect upon the viewer: “no matter how I feel as an artist or a painter, the paintings end up looking happy” (Ibid.). Sterile, medicinal and forensic, yet aesthetically jubilant, Hirst's Pharmaceutical Paintings are a modern day devotional paean to the life-giving promise of modern science.

The all-pervading presence of death is the Hirstian trope par excellence. Cryptically hidden beneath the immaculate surface of Hydroquinone lies a deathly undertone typical of the Pharmaceutical Paintings. In the early 1990s, Hirst started naming these paintings alphabetically after the exotic sounding substances listed in the Sigma Chemical Company's catalogue Biochemical Organic Compounds for Research and Diagnostic Reagents. Entitled Hydroquinone, the present work references a mass produced compound harnessed in the production of pharmaceutical products. Thus the life-enhancing traits of Hydroquinone mirrors the quintessential précis of Hirst's painting: behind compelling aesthetic appeal and comforting geometric order lies hidden the inevitability of mortality.