DAMIEN HIRST | Beautiful, intense, violently, gorgeous, painful, invading love, painting

Ben Brown Fine Arts, London
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2008

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Extremely close inspection reveals some very faint hairline cracks in isolated places to the edge of the canvas.
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A cacophony of riotous colour, Beautiful, intense, violently, gorgeous, painful, invading love, painting is an arresting and early example from Damien Hirst’s iconic series of Spin Paintings. Bursting with a dynamic vitality, a spinning vortex pulsates outward offering visions of vigorous movement and unruly colour. Exuding a heady effervescence of psychedelic effect, an explosion of colour ignites from the epicentre of a circular shaped canvas. Meanwhile, as though accelerated by osmosis, outpourings of red, orange, pink and yellow dominate the composition. Polychromatic streaks of playful azure and pronounced lime green punctuate an otherwise chaotic arrangement, espousing a wholly complete and homogenous painterly surface. Created in 1995 as an early iteration of 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. One year after the series’ inception, 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, intense, violently, gorgeous, painful, invading love, 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). Influenced by the postmodern privileging of chance and the aleatory, Hirst exerts a limited amount of control in the creation of these works. By pouring a succession of different hues of household emulsion paint onto a rapidly rotating canvas, Hirst creates variegated surfaces of gravity-informed colour that bespeak the centrifugal energy of their execution. Emptied over the canvas in a manner akin to Jackson Pollock as captured in the iconic photographs by Hans Namuth, Hirst’s application of paint combined with the mechanical spin of the surface is undeniably performative in its vigour.