Damien Hirst
The definitive catalogue of Damien Hirst’s Spot Paintings, documenting the series from its beginnings in 1986 through 2011. Extensively illustrated, the monumental volume traces one of the most recognizable and sustained bodies of work in contemporary art.
- Publisher
- Other Criteria and Gagosian Gallery
- Year
- 2011
- Format
- Hardback with slip case
- Pages
- 1074
Overview
Selected by ZCA
Selected for its exceptional documentary scope, The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011 provides the essential published record of the series that became one of Damien Hirst’s defining contributions to contemporary painting. Its combination of comprehensive cataloguing, extensive illustration, critical essays, and conversations with major artists makes it both an important research tool and a substantial publication in its own right.
Damien Hirst began producing Spot Paintings in 1986, developing a deceptively simple system in which colored circles are organized against white grounds according to predetermined structures. What initially appears serial and impersonal becomes, across hundreds of works, an extended investigation into color, scale, repetition, difference, authorship, and systems of production. The series ranges dramatically in physical and chromatic scale—from paintings containing only a handful of large spots to compositions of extraordinary density. One work completed in 2011 contains 25,781 individual one-millimeter spots without repeating a color.
The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011 was conceived as the comprehensive record of this twenty-five-year body of work. More than 99 percent of the documented Spot Paintings are illustrated, providing an unusual opportunity to examine the evolution and internal logic of a series whose individual works are dispersed internationally. The publication includes essays by Museum of Modern Art curator Ann Temkin, cultural critic Michael Bracewell, and art historian Robert Pincus-Witten, together with a conversation between Hirst, John Baldessari, and Ed Ruscha.
Why It Belongs
The publication is significant because the Spot Paintings cannot be fully understood through isolated examples. Their meaning emerges partly through accumulation: repetition and variation across hundreds of paintings transform a seemingly straightforward compositional formula into an enormous investigation of color, seriality, production, and the distinction between individual artwork and continuing system.
The catalogue therefore has particular research value. By bringing the series together chronologically and visually, it makes possible comparisons that would otherwise be difficult across works distributed among collections worldwide. Its critical contributions also position the Spot Paintings within broader histories of postwar abstraction, conceptual art, serial production, and contemporary artistic authorship.
Publication Details
- Full title
- Damien Hirst
- Subtitle
- The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011
- Author(s)
- Damien Hirst, Michael Bracewell, Robert Pincus-Witten
- Publisher
- Other Criteria and Gagosian Gallery
- Year
- 2011
- ISBN
- 978-1-906967-48-2
- Binding
- Hardback with slip case
- Pages
- 1074
- Language
- English