Damien Hirst

Executed in 1995, the same year that Damien Hirst won the Turner Prize for his iconic sculpture Mother and Child Divided, Pemoline is a remarkable example of the artist’s Spot Paintings: one of the most globally significant series in the entirety of Hirst’s oeuvre. First appearing as painted spots on the exhibition walls of Freeze (1988), the series has grown over time, filling canvases of all shapes and sizes and exploring almost any colour combination possible. Every member of the Spot Paintings shares a certain set of properties: the shapes involved on any work are all and only spots or spots cut by the vertical edge of the canvas, these 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.

Pemoline is no exception. The sheer scale of the uniformity – this industry of spots – is part of the present work’s power. The institution of the series verges on performance art. The conception and distribution of the Spot Paintings is deliberately reminiscent of the pharmaceutical industry: an idea is drawn up by an individual entity before being variously marketed and liberally distributed around the world. This relation to modern medicine runs deep into Hirst’s oeuvre. The Spot Paintings were executed in parallel to the Medicine Cabinets series, begun in 1988, with works containing the packaging of Hirst’s late grandmother’s medicine displayed in wall-mounted cabinets. The all-pervading presence of death is the Hirstian trope par excellence. Cryptically hidden beneath the immaculate surface of Pemoline lies the deathly undertone familiar to the Pharmaceutical Spot 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. Pemoline is a stimulant drug that was used to treat Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Narcolepsy; however, it has since been withdrawn due to its role in causing liver failure amongst its users. Thus, the potentially harmful traits of Pemoline mirror the quintessential précis of Hirst's eponymous painting: behind compelling aesthetic appeal and comforting geometric order lies hidden the inevitability of mortality.

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. 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). Disseminated via a simple schema of geometric logic, the controlled emotionless self-restriction of Hirst's candy-coloured grid belies an unsettling and fractured viewing experience: "If you look closely at any one of these paintings a strange thing happens; because of the lack of repeated colours there is no harmony... in every painting there is a subliminal sense of unease; yet the colours project so much joy it's hard to feel it, but it's there. The horror underlying everything. The horror that can overwhelm everything at any moment" (Damien Hirst, Ibid.).

Hirst's complex dialectic, founded in themes of death and a confrontation of faith structures, is ultimately revealed through the cheerful simplicity of colour: "I love colour. I feel it inside me. It gives me a buzz. I hate taste - it's acquired" (Ibid.). His aim is to motivate an audience to think about the terms of their existence, to ontologically expose and undermine the avoidance of death by fully and poetically acknowledging its omnipotence; an impetus perfectly exemplified by Pemoline.