Damien Hirst

Gagosian Gallery, New York

Private Collection

Phillips de Pury, New York, 15 November 2007, Lot 10

Acquired from the above by the present owner 

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly, although the overall tonality is more vibrant in the original. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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In its pulsating monochromatic palette Beautiful where did all the colour go painting, bursts with dynamic energy and presents an early and important example of Damien Hirst’s iconic Spin Paintings. Created in 1992 as the second painting in this iconic series, the present work brilliantly encapsulates Hirst’s tongue-in-cheek attitude to art historical tradition through its method of production: standing from above and pouring household emulsion paint onto a rapidly rotating canvas, Hirst would engender vibrant expressions of liberation, chance, and spontaneity.

Hirst made his very first Spin Paintings in 1992 in his studio in Brixton, London, titling the works with the amusingly convoluted titles that were to become the hallmark of the series - Beautiful Ray of Sunshine on a Rainy Day Painting and the present work Beautiful where did all the colour go painting. Portrait in format, these two inaugural paintings are rare foundational examples of a series that would come to define the iconic formal lexicon of Hirst’s oeuvre. One year after their creation, Hirst set up a spin painting stall with fellow artist Angus Fairhurst at a street art fair ‘A Fete Worse than Death’. Made-up as clowns by performance artist Leigh Bowery, Fairhurst and Hirst invited visitors to pay £1 to create their own spin paintings to be signed by the pair. When Hirst started the series in earnest in 1994 on circular shaped canvases, they became one of the most instantly recognisable and popular parts of his entire corpus. Beautiful where did all the colour go painting is a consummate example, epitomising Hirst’s metaphor that the spinning vortex of paint resembles the chaotic unpredictability of existence: “The movement sort of implies life” (Damien Hirst cited in: Damien Hirst and Gordon Burn, On the Way to Work, London 2001, p. 221).

Hirst stated that the concept first came to him in the 1970s following an episode of the children’s television programme 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” (Damien Hirst cited in: Mark Brown, The Guardian, 29 August 2012, online). Hirst never lost his childlike sense of wonder in the process of creating these works; indeed, as the present work attests, the spin paintings embody the euphoric ecstasy of childlike exploration.