Perhaps bored with encasing cows in formaldehyde or covering a platinum skull in real diamonds (that one sold for 50 million pounds sterling), British artist Damien Hirst has really
shocked art critics by his latest activity: he's actually painting real paintings.
Now he has an exhibition of paintings at London's Wallace Collection, a museum that includes works by Poussin, Titian and Velazquez in its permanent collection. Mr. Hirst seems amused by the idea that showing in a traditional setting, and working in oils, should have an equal capacity to draw attention.
"After seeing me in the studio, covered in paint, someone actually said to me, 'Are you really making these yourself?' But it's funny that that's shocking, that it's more shocking for me to be painting, than formaldehyde," he said in a recent interview. To greet the press, he is wearing a T-shirt with the slogan "The Shock of The New."
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This, the first of the paintings in the current show, is, like almost all the others, of a skull against a very dark blue or black background. Others feature grids of spots (executed in white, by pressing the lid of his paint tube against the canvas), shark's jawbones, ashtrays and water glasses sketchily outlined in titanium white. The last is a nod to his old tutor, Michael Craig-Martin, and his conceptual piece "An Oak Tree," which was a glass of water on a glass shelf.
The influence of Francis Bacon, one of Mr. Hirst's great heroes, is immediately apparent, especially in the triptych "The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth," which even uses Bacon's ghostly cages. "You can't avoid comparisons," he says. "I've put Bacon frames on my pictures but you put them in here and everybody's got a gold frame. But if I put it in one of my normal galleries it looks like a Bacon rip-off. You ask: Can I use that? But all great artists do that ... you go through being very heavily influenced."
The collection has already been sold -- no doubt for a pretty penny -- to Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk. Pinchuk has already displayed the paintings earlier this year and Kiev, but consented to have them shown in London at the prestigious Wallace Collection. You can see the rest of the paintings at the Wallace Collection's website. You can read Jackie Wullschlager's interesting and perceptive review of the collection (she seems convinced that Hirst is playing an enormous joke on us all, and she's probably right) here.
