Damien Hirst

White Cube, London
Private Collection, USA
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Contemporary Art Evening Sale, 27 February 2008, Lot 2
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

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. 257, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonalities are slightly warmer and the light blue tends more twoards duck egg in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is a very small spot of loss to the extreme bottom edge at the centre. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Bursting with a magnificently dynamic energy, Beautiful, Shattered, Mellow, Exploding, Paint-filled, Balloons Painting is a powerfully appealing example of Damien Hirst’s iconic Spin paintings. Created in 1996, a year in which Hirst continued his rise to international acclaim with exhibitions at Kunsthalle Dusseldorf and Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the present work brilliantly encapsulates Hirst’s tongue-in-cheek attitude to art historical tradition through its method of production. Hirst made his first Spin painting in 1992, awarding it with one of the amusingly convoluted titles which were to become a hallmark of the series - Beautiful Ray of Sunshine on a Rainy Day Painting - and the Spin paintings rapidly became one of the most instantly recognisable and popular parts of Hirst’s corpus. The artist stated recently that the idea first occurred to him in the 1970s following an episode of the television series Blue Peter: “I grew up with Blue Peter. I got my idea for the spin paintings from an episode in the 1970s… I remember thinking: ‘That’s fun, whereas art is something more serious… I just thought: ‘Why does it have to be like that?... Actually, the better art is the art made with the spin machine’ “ (the artist cited in: Mark Brown, The Guardian, 29 August 2012, n.p.). In its pulsating kaleidoscope of red and green with a splash of white, Beautiful, Shattered, Mellow, Exploding, Paint-filled, Balloons Painting is a consummate illustration of the Spin series, and truly epitomises Hirst’s own view of the spinning vortex of paint that forms the composition: “The movement sort of implies life” (the artist cited in: Damien Hirst and Gordon Burn, On the Way to Work, London 2001, p. 221).