Gagosian Gallery is holding a worldwide exhibition celebrating 25 years of spot paintings, entitled “The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011” by Damien Hirst.
The highly anticipated exhibition will take place all at once across all of Gagosian Gallery’s eleven locations in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Rome, Athens, Geneva and Hong Kong. The event begins on January 12 and was conceived as a single exhibition in multiple locations.
The majority of the paintings that will be exhibited are on loan from private individuals and public institutions, including and impressive 150 lenders from twenty countries. There will be more than 300 paintings in total including the very first spot on board that Hirst created in 1986 and the smallest spot painting that measures in at just 1 by ½ inch, which he created in 1996. There will also be a monumental piece comprising only four spots, each measuring 60 inches in diameter. One of the more recent spot paintings, which Hirst completed in 2011, contains an impressive 25,781 spots each measuring 1 millimeter in diameter, with no single color repeated.
Damien Hirst is an English artist, entrepreneur and art collector. Internationally renowned, Hirst is the most prominent member of a group known as the Young British Artists and reportedly is Britain’s richest living artist. His artwork often sells well over the million dollar mark. Referencing his spot paintings, Hirst has said the series is “a battle between the machine made and man-made. From a distance they look machine made, and then on closer inspection you can see trace of the human hand, pencil lines, and compass holes.
In conjunction with the exhibition, the third issue of the Gagosian App for iPad will also launch in January and provide users with an interactive look at the series that features more than ninety of Hirst’s spot paintings. A fully illustrated and comprehensive publication entitled The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011 will also be available at the same time as the exhibition. The book is published by Gagosian Gallery and Other Criteria and includes essays by Museum of Modern Art curator Ann Temkin, a conversation between Damien Hirst, Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari and more.
“The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011” exhibition precedes the upcoming exhibition of Hirst’s work at the Tate Museum in London, set to take place in April 2012.
The exhibition will be on display at one Hong Kong location; 7/F, 12 Pedder Street.
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