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PRO accounts for artists

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Managing clients and sales via CRM

Artworks mailing lists

Sales of reproductions and digital copies

Damien Hirst presents new series of "Bonnard-inspired" paintings

One of the most provocative contemporary artists, Damien Hirst, famous for a human skull adorned with diamonds, and series of artworks with dead animals, presents the "Veil Paintings" at Gagosian gallery in Los Angeles in March 2018. It will be Hirst’s first exhibition in the US since his returning to the gallery in 2016.

No doubt that Damien Hirst was inspired by Post-Impressionist French artist Pierre Bonnard when creating the multi-colored paintings of the series. Since Hirst’s return to the gallery in 2016 after a more than three-year separation, it will be the first US show for him. Hirst’s last outing at the gallery’s Los Angeles location was in 2012, when the "The Complete Spot Paintings" took over every one of Gagosian’s then-11 worldwide locations with 331 of the over 1,000 works in the series.

Damien Hirst’s Veil of Love’s Secrets (2017). Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery. (c)Damien Hirst and Scie

"I've always loved Bonnard and his color.
I went to see a show at the Pompidou in Paris of de Kooning and Bonnard,
when I was a student and both artists blew me away."

Damien Hirst

Nude in the Bath and Small Dog

Pierre Bonnard

1941, 121×151 cm

Pierre Bonnard (1867−1947) was a French artist, as well as a founding member of Les Nabis , the Post-Impressionist group of avant-garde painters. He is generally regarded as one of the greatest colorists of modern art.
Bonnard preferred to work from memory, using drawings as a reference, and his paintings are often characterized by a dreamlike quality. Working in the studio, he could constantly retouch the surface by memory, building up a mosaic of colours.

Everyone could see Damien Hirst working on a painting, explaining his interest in Bonnard and De Kooning on his Instagram

The profusion of overlapping colored dots undoubtedly refers to Bonnard, as well as to Georges Seurat and Pointillism , but they also have obvious roots in Hirst’s own work. Hirst’s "Visual Candy Paintings", created between 1993 and 1995, also represented a strict abstraction, filling the canvases with large colored spots of paint of different sizes. One work, in particular, the Super Happy Happy Dabby, with its smaller, more evenly sized brushstrokes, is a clear prototype from the point of view of the new series.

Damien Hirst. Super Happy Happy Dabby, 1993, Visual Candy Paintings.
Image: Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2013

"I originally wanted the ‘Spots' to look like they were painted by a human trying to paint like a machine."
Damien Hirst

From the moment he won the Turner Prize in 1995, Hirst continues to engage and surprise his audiences on Instagram.
The artist repeatedly times excited the minds of people with his works. In June 2007, Hirst presented his work For the Love of God, at an exhibition Beyond Belief, opened at the White Cube gallery in London. It was a human skull recreated in platinum and adorned with 8,601 diamonds weighing a total of 1,106.18 carats. It was modelled on an 18th-century skull, but the only surviving human part of the original was the teeth. The asking price for For the Love of God was £50,000,000 ($100 million or 75 million euros). It didn’t sell outright and was sold to a consortium that included Hirst himself and his gallery White Cube.

In September 2008, Hirst made an unprecedented move for a living artist by selling a complete show, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, at Sotheby’s by auction and bypassing his long-standing galleries. The auction raised £111 million ($198 million), breaking the record for a one-artist auction as well as Hirst’s own record with £10.3 million for The Golden Calf, an animal with 18-carat gold horns and hooves, preserved in formaldehyde.

Left: Damien Hirst. For the Love of God, 2007. White Cube Gallery, London, England

Hirst currently has a solo show featuring the "Visual Candy" works at Gagosian Hong Kong, on view through March 3, 2018. Another new body of work, the "Colour Space" canvases, will debut also in March at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, UK. The Old Master works typically on view in the ornate British mansion will be replaced with 250 Hirsts featuring over 4 million dots, collectively.

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