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Gagosian Quarterly

July 4, 2020

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.” Accompanying their conversation is a video of Hirst at work in his London studio, providing an inside look at the process behind these immersive abstractions.

Damien Hirst working on Veil paintings in his London studio, 2017

Damien Hirst working on Veil paintings in his London studio, 2017

Damien Hirst

Since emerging onto the international art scene in the late 1980s, Damien Hirst has created installations, sculptures, paintings, and drawings that examine the complex relationships between art and beauty, religion and science, and life and death. His work traces the uncertainties that lie at the heart of human experience. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates

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Alison McDonald

Alison McDonald is the Chief Creative Officer at Gagosian and has overseen marketing and publications at the gallery since 2002. During her tenure she has worked closely with Larry Gagosian to shape every aspect of the gallery’s extensive publishing program and has personally overseen more than five hundred books dedicated to the gallery’s artists. In 2020, McDonald was included in the Observer’s Arts Power 50.

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Alison McDonald How did the Veils series begin?

Damien Hirst I fell into painting on my own after my friend Angus Fairhurst died, in 2008, but it was dark and solitary. With the Veils, I started where I had left off with the Visual Candy paintings in the early 1990s. I realized that I had made paintings with this sense of celebration, but not at the right scale. I guess I had a kind of fear of abstract painting at the time because I was focusing on Minimalism. The Visual Candy paintings were a great idea but very small. I was making big Spot paintings, but for some reason I didn’t make the right leap of scale with these works until just before my Gagosian show in LA in 2018. I painted them all just before my big Treasures show in Venice [Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable: Damien Hirst]. The whole series took around two years to complete.

AMcd You seem to be comfortable working on many canvases at once. Is that fair to say?

DH I imagined this whole series in one go and worked it out in advance. I don’t think it matters how many paintings you make in a series, as long as you’re clear. In the beginning of my career, I was looking a lot at artists like On Kawara, and I loved the idea of an infinite series. But it isn’t like that for me anymore; there are ninety-four paintings in this series and a series of works on paper, and there won’t be any more. And I painted them all together, as they all inform each other. I immersed myself in the paintings. And then ended the series.

In the Studio: Damien Hirst’s Veil Paintings

Damien Hirst, Veil of Logic, 2017, oil on canvas, 66 × 45 inches (167.6 × 114.3 cm)

AMcd What preparations happened on the canvas, or with the paint and brushes and so on, before you started painting?

DH The first thing I did was paint all the canvases different colors. I have a selection of colors I love and use over and over again. They are like sweet shop colors and the colors of fruit and flowers; they are my go-to colors. I mixed them myself and I started with those. I used a longer-than-normal brush—not Matisse-style, but a bristle brush about two or two and a half feet long—just long enough to get a bit more distance from the painting surface and not be awkward. I wanted to make paintings that were a celebration and that revealed something and obscured something at the same time. 

Damien Hirst working on Veil paintings in his London studio, 2017

AMcd  Were there any specific paintings or painters you were thinking about when you embarked on this body of work?

DH Apart from the obvious painters like Georges Seurat and Pierre Bonnard, I thought a lot about Willem de Kooning and Chaïm Soutine, even Francisco de Goya in his marks. But even though they are abstract paintings, I never get far away from Op painters like Larry Poons or Bridget Riley, and Yayoi Kusama. These paintings felt totally new and right to me, even with all the historical stuff going on. I think maybe in the early ’90s I was right to hold back, because this type of painting was negative and retro and kind of would have got in the way of my romance with Minimalism at the time and my love of Sol LeWitt, with his exploration of the cube and boxes.

In the Studio: Damien Hirst’s Veil Paintings

Damien Hirst with Veil of Hidden Meaning (2017–18), London, 2020

In the Studio: Damien Hirst’s Veil Paintings

Damien Hirst, Veil of Hidden Meaning, 2017–18, oil on canvas, 120 × 96 inches (305 × 244 cm)

AMcd You have always worked in series. Is this connected to the way you work through your ideas?

DH I like series because they define you. I have so many conflicting ideas, and a series is great way to jump in and out of something. Also, they are a battle with the idea of death. The infinite series I made at the beginning of my career was a way for me to not face that. It’s  a great way to imagine that you will last forever—even though you won’t. Now that I’m older the series are getting smaller, and that feels more realistic and wiser, maybe even more mature, although I hate to say that. I think with this series I made the right number of paintings for how I was feeling and then moved on, and maybe in my Spot paintings I was hiding from my own mortality.

AMcd Do you find that the music you listen to in the studio impacts your paintings?

DH With the Veil paintings I found that listening to music gave me more focus. It felt like each painting was worked out even before I began, and that once I started it was just a process of bringing them all into the world how I imagined them.

In the Studio: Damien Hirst’s Veil Paintings

Installation view, Damien Hirst: The Veil Paintings, Gagosian, Beverly Hills, March 1–April 14, 2018

AMcd What connections do you see between the Spots, the Visual Candy paintings, the Colour Space works, and the Veils? Are these all part of the same lineage for you? Or are you after different things?

DH It’s an obvious set of steps for me to get from my Visual Candy paintings through the Spot paintings and Colour Space paintings to the Veil paintings, but I don’t think I could have done it in one leap. The Visual Candy paintings were me getting my love of the New York School painters out of my system; they were kind of like the detritus from the Spot paintings, because my heart felt like I was into ’50s gestural painting at the time, and my head was in Minimalism and the consumer world. I was trying desperately to move into the present because I could see it and feel it, but I wasn’t there. I was soaking up the works of Tony Cragg, Meyer Vaisman, Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons, Sherrie Levine. I suppose I was a bit embarrassed that I had this love of de Kooning when it was all Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Carl Andre. Then years later, when I made the catalogue raisonné of my Spot paintings, I saw the first Spot paintings I had made, with the drips, and I thought, Fuck, they were good! And so I made a new series like those, called the Colour Space paintings, and that gave me the confidence and freedom to let loose and get lost and really celebrate all those years and moments in my Veil paintings.

Damien Hirst: The Veil Paintings, Gagosian, Beverly Hills, March 1–April 14, 2018

Artwork © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2020

Damien Hirst and Ashley Bickerton during an installation at Newport Street Gallery, London, c. 2017

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.

Damien Hirst's Reclining Woman on the cover of Gagosian Quarterly, Fall 2021

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.

Andrea Domenico Remps, Cabinet of Curiosities, c. 1690, oil on canvas, 39 × 54 inches (99 × 137 cm), Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence, Italy.

For Sale: Baby Shoes. Never Worn.

Sydney Stutterheim meditates on the power and possibilities of small-format artworks throughout time.

Damien Hirst, Happiness, 1993–94, oil on canvas, 24 × 17 ⅞ inches.

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, Fruit Salad, 2016, household gloss on canvas, 16 × 24 inches.

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.

River Café menu with illustration by Ed Ruscha.

The River Café Cookbook

London’s River Café, a culinary mecca perched on a bend in the River Thames, celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 2018. To celebrate this milestone and the publication of her cookbook River Café London, cofounder Ruth Rogers sat down with Derek Blasberg to discuss the famed restaurant’s allure.

Still from video Visions of the Self: Jenny Saville on Rembrandt

Visions of the Self: Jenny Saville on Rembrandt

Jenny Saville reveals the process behind her new self-portrait, painted in response to Rembrandt’s masterpiece Self-Portrait with Two Circles.

Self portrait of Francesca Woodman, she stands against a wall holding pieces of ripped wallpaper in front of her face and legs

Francesca Woodman

Ahead of the first exhibition of Francesca Woodman’s photographs at Gagosian, director Putri Tan speaks with historian and curator Corey Keller about new insights into the artist’s work. The two unravel themes of the body, space, architecture, and ambiguity.

self portrait by Jamian Juliano-Villani

Jamian Juliano-Villani and Jordan Wolfson

Ahead of her forthcoming exhibition in New York, Jamian Juliano-Villani speaks with Jordan Wolfson about her approach to painting and what she has learned from running her own gallery, O’Flaherty’s.

portrait of Stanley Whitney

Stanley Whitney: Vibrations of the Day

Stanley Whitney invited professor and musician-biographer John Szwed to his studio in Long Island as he prepared for an upcoming survey at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum to discuss the resonances between painting and jazz.

Black and white portrait of Katherine Dunham leaping in the air

Border Crossings: Exile and American Modern Dance, 1900–1955

Dance scholars Mark Franko and Ninotchka Bennahum join the Quarterly’s Gillian Jakab in a conversation about the exhibition Border Crossings at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Cocurated by Bennahum and Bruce Robertson, the show reexamines twentieth-century modern dance in the context of war, exile, and injustice. An accompanying catalogue, coedited by Bennahum and Rena Heinrich and published earlier this year, bridges the New York presentation with its West Coast counterpart at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Black and white portrait of Frida Escobedo

Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire: Frida Escobedo

In this ongoing series, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has devised a set of thirty-seven questions that invite artists, authors, musicians, and other visionaries to address key elements of their lives and creative practices. Respondents select from the larger questionnaire and reply in as many or as few words as they desire. For the first installment of 2024, we are honored to present the architect Frida Escobedo.