Works Exhibited
About
A veil is a barrier, a curtain between two things, something that you can look at and pass through. It’s solid yet invisible and reveals and yet obscures the truth, the thing that we are searching for.
—Damien Hirst
Gagosian will present Damien Hirst’s latest series, The Veil Paintings, as the 2018 Oscars show, a much-anticipated annual fixture in the Los Angeles cultural calendar. Hirst’s last exhibition in Los Angeles was The Complete Spot Paintings in 2012.
Following Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, his highly ambitious sculpture exhibition at Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana in Venice last year, Hirst was drawn towards the immediacy of painting and a return to the studio. This new series takes the Visual Candy paintings of the 1990s as a point of departure and embraces color and gestural painting on a large scale. Referencing both Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, The Veil Paintings layer brushstrokes and bright dabs of heavy impasto, enveloping the viewer in vast fields of color.
Inspired partly by the Pointillist innovations of Georges Seurat and the post-Impressionist paintings of Pierre Bonnard, Hirst continues his examination of color and its effect on the eye in The Veil Paintings. While in the Spot Paintings and Medicine Cabinet series, his use of color was contained within the formality of the grid and the minimalist pharmaceutical packaging, here it is given free reign, with joyous results.
#VeilPaintings
Truth Revealed: Damien Hirst and James Fox on Ashley Bickerton
In conversation with James Fox, Damien Hirst reflects on the artwork of his longtime friend.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2021
The Fall 2021 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Damien Hirst’s Reclining Woman (2011) on its cover.
For Sale: Baby Shoes. Never Worn.
Sydney Stutterheim meditates on the power and possibilities of small-format artworks throughout time.
In the Studio: Damien Hirst’s Veil Paintings
Damien Hirst speaks about his Veil paintings with Gagosian’s Alison McDonald. “I wanted to make paintings that were a celebration,” he says, “and that revealed something and obscured something at the same time.”
Damien Hirst: Visual Candy
James Fox considers the origins of Damien Hirst’s Visual Candy paintings on the occasion of a recent exhibition of these early works in Hong Kong.
Damien Hirst: Colour Space Paintings
Blake Gopnik examines the artist’s “dot” paintings in relation to the history of representation in Western art, in which dabs of paint have served as fundamental units of depiction and markers of objective truth.
