“Who’s afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?” or how Damien Hirst chose Romania’s national colours for a new direction in painting

                  “Who’s afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue” by Damien Hirst, 2000, Butterflies and household gloss paint on canvas, 180 x 180 cm, Selling price: £ 600 000

           And indeed, who might be afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? A Romanian can’t be afraid of the 3 colours because they represent the national flag of Romania. On the contrary, he should love them and especially if the warm and cold colours have been put together by an artist, and not any artist, but by the internationally renown artist, known particularly for his great appreciation  of colour,  Damien Hirst.

 

                                       Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst, born in 1965 in England, is the most romantic artist of our time and the first artist ever in the history of art to become a millionaire before he was 40 years old. In 2010 his wealth was estimated at £215m in the Sunday Times Rich List.

“I felt that I was in a field in the summer trying to paint these three large canvases, and all the time butterflies kept on flying down and getting stuck in the paint. So I kept painting them in and painting the canvases, and the butterflies kept flying in, and the paint got thicker and thicker as the butterflies kept landing”, said Damien Hirst to his personal friend, the first buyer of the painting.

The painting was a change of direction for the artist. Up to this point his works had to be perfect and were almost quite clinical. This was a move towards a more painterly, natural and confident  approach where the painting became an object in its own right. Later he used this thick paint technique to simulate clouds in other butterfly paintings.

        This art work is currently one of the highlight works in the second exhibition in the House of the Nobleman that opened during London’s Frieze Art Fair in a stunning, Grade 1 listed ambassadorial palace in Cornwall Terrace, a grand sweeping avenue that overlooks Regent’s Park.  The work is being exhibited and sold with the collaboration  of prestigious English curators, English Garden Lounging, who seek out the Romantic and pictursque in art. This is the first time that the work has ever been for sale and is a unique opportunity to purchase the work privately and prior to very high-profile museum and gallery exhibitions of the artist in 2012.

              “Beautiful Bleeding Wound Over the Materialism of Money Painting”, by Damien Hirst, 2005, Household gloss paint and credit card on canvas, 60 x 84 inches (152.4 x 213.4 cm), Gagosian Gallery

     Hirst's first exhibition with Gagosian Gallery, entitled "No Sense of Absolute Corruption," was in 1996 at the now-closed SoHo location in New York. In 2012, “The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011” will take place simultaneously across each of Gagosian Gallery’s eleven locations in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Rome, Athens, Geneva and Hong Kong. It will include loans from public institutions and private collections as well as from the artist. The exhibition will open in every city on January 12th and continue through February 18th, 2012.

Then in April 2012, Tate Modern will present the first substantial survey of Damien Hirst’s work ever held in the UK. Hirst is widely regarded as one of the most important artists working today and has created some of the most iconic works in recent history. Sponsored by the Qatar Museums Authority, the exhibition will provide a journey through two decades of Hirst’s inventive practice. It will also form part of the London 2012 Festival, the culmination of the Cultural Olympiad. Bringing together over seventy of the artist's seminal works, the exhibition will include sculptures from the early 1990s, such as “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”, in which he suspended a shark in formaldehyde and “Mother and Child Divided“, a four-part sculpture of a bisected cow and calf. 

 “The physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”, by Damien Hirst

“Mother and child divided”, by Damien Hirst

“Mother and child divided”, by Damien Hirst

“Mother and child divided”, by Damien Hirst

     Also on show will be important vitrines, such as “A Thousand Years” 1990, in which the cycle of life is represented by a cow's head, flies and insect-o-cutor. Alongside these sculptures will be cabinets displaying rows of pills, instruments and medical packaging, as well as paintings made throughout Hirst's career from his spot, spin, butterfly and fly series. In addition, two major installations will be on view: “In and Out of Love” 1991, which has not been shown in its entirety since its creation, and “Pharmacy” 1992. It has also just been announced that the exhibition will include Hirst’s 2007 diamond encased human skull, “For The Love Of God,” the first time it will be exhibited in a public museum in Britain.

              “For the Love of God”, by Damien Hirst

        “I want you because I can't have you”, by Damien Hirst

              “The Explosion Exalted”, by Damien Hirst

                   “Virgin Mother”, by Damien Hirst

In 2013, the Qatar Museum Authority will host the first exhibition of Damien's work in Qatar. The curator of the exhibition is yet to be announced but will be an entirely different concept to the exhibition in London at Tate Modern.

Damien Hirst is one of the most prominent artists to have emerged from the British art scene in the 1990s. Hirst’s exploration of imagery is notable for its strong associations to life and death, and to belief and value systems.

Damien Hirst first came to public attention in London in 1988 when he conceived and curated Freeze, an exhibition of his own work and that of his friends and fellow Goldsmiths College students, staged in a disused London warehouse. Almost a quarter of a century since that pivotal show, Hirst has become one of the most influential artists of his generation.

For further information please contact Mary Mc Caughey, English Garden Lounging - mary@englishgardenlounging.com, +44 (0) 7931 425107