A dedicated line of enquiry spanning approximately twenty five years, Hirst’s Spot Paintings are amongst the YBA group's most distinctive body of work. Typical of the series, Ergocalciferol sees a constellation of polychromatic circles scattered across the canvas, comprising an invisible grid of playful polka dots that allude to infinity. Offering a wealth of visual information, the unemotional multi-coloured arrangement is hypnotising in its detail and regimented repetition.
Each assigned a medical title, Hirst paints a relationship between the artistic and the scientific, engaging in a theme that reoccurs across the artist’s oeuvre mortality. Equating the medical with the artistic, Hirst continues to remind the viewer of the significance of his creative output: ‘Art is like medicine--it can heal. Yet I've always been amazed at how many people believe in medicine but don't believe in art, without questioning either.’ (R. Violet, ed., I want to Spend the Rest of My Life Elsewhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now., London, 1997, p. 246).
A celebrated series with a trade mark consistency, Hirst’s Spot Paintings came into fruition during his infamous years at Goldsmiths, London. In their infancy Spot Paintings consisted of circles one to four inches in diameter. During this time, the artist played a crucial role in the rise of the Young British Artist's, organising the inaugural exhibition Freeze in 1988. The most celebrated and notorious of the group, Hirst became synonymous with shock tactics, critically and controversially questioning the limits of conceptual art.
The pulsating canvases of colour—ranging from dense fields of tiny dots to a few spare circles isolated against an expanse of white—call to mind Georges Seurat, Hans Hoffmann, Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella and many more. Speaking to the Minimalist-conceptual continuum and Richter’s colour experimentations, Hirst’s Spot Paintings are entrenched in the history of Modernism. Furthermore parallels can also be drawn between Ergocalciferol and a nineteenth century Pointillist approach to painting.
Few artists have such an enduring power to shock and invigorate the public debate surrounding contemporary art. Once again with his current ground-breaking Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable in Venice, the artist demonstrates his exceptional scope of exhaustive productivity. Hirst’s provocative and revolutionary output defines the British artist as a visionary craftsman of the twentieth first century.