"A scientific approach to painting in a similar way to the drug companies’ scientific approach to life. Art doesn’t purport to have all the answers; the drug companies do. Hence the title of the series, The Pharmaceutical Paintings, and the individual titles of the paintings themselves […] Art is like medicine, it can heal."
—Damien HirstExecuted in 1995, the same year that Damien Hirst was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize, Biotin Hydrazide is an exquisite early example of the young artist’s vision and ambition, a testament to the role played by his iconic Spot Paintings in establishing his reputation at the vanguard of the ‘90s British art scene. Meticulously rendered on an impressive scale, the work draws conceptual connections between Hirst’s other foundational series, combining the ordered, grid-like structure of the Medicine Cabinets, the relationship between mortality and medicine explored across the cabinets and iconic formaldehyde works, and the exuberant sense of colour expressed by the Spin Paintings.

 

Arranged against a brilliant white ground, the uniquely mixed hues of household paint seem to vibrate with energy here, our eye seeking out patterns and responding to the chromatic relationships established across the composition that, nevertheless, fail to resolve. As Michael Bracewell has described, drawn to ‘the warmer-coloured spots, the gaze then encounters seeming sudden diagonals, verticals or broken lines of semi-coherence; look again, and even these fleeting spooks of visual sense turn out to be illusions.’ⁱ Yet, despite this energetic activity, the work achieves an incredible compositional balance, rooted in the methodical, scientific approach to the composition based on a philosophy of chromatic relationships and their manipulation.

 

In this respect, Biotin Hydrazide  recalls the methods adopted by Gerhard Richter as he transitioned from working in black and white to centralising colour in paintings such as 256 Farhen. Applying a mathematical precision to the mixing of his colours, Richter introduced an element of chance and randomisation in his selection of them. Stumbling across the catalogue of chemical company Sigma- Aldrich’s ‘Biochemicals for Research and Diagnostic Reagents’, Hirst struck upon a similar strategy, employing the catalogue as a vast and random title-generator perfectly attuned to his vision of the possibly infinite variety the Pharmaceutical Paintings.

 

Striking a balance between art and science, the Pharmaceutical Paintings operate according to strict limitations: crisply rendered and meticulously spaced, the relationships of spots within a painting are carefully regulated with no signal colour appearing twice in any individual composition. Although these early works were all painted methodically by hand, Hirst was interested in the idea of the spots appearing as though they had been executed by a machine, or ‘by a person trying to paint like a machine.’ⁱⁱ Despite the playful rigidity of this approach, the series has proven to be remarkably versatile, including unexpected elements such as the sudden cropping of spots on the right vertical edge of the present work, a reference at once to the infinitely expansive Spot Paintings and a call back to the very earliest works from the series.

 

 

Spots and Freeze

 

Now spanning over a quarter of a century, Hirst’s carefully rendered Pharmaceutical Paintings have become synonymous with the artist himself, bridging his earliest exhibitions as a student in London in the late 1980s to the staggering 2012 Spot Painting retrospective, hosted by Gagosian across eleven of their global galleries simultaneously, where the present work was also exhibited. Painted directly onto the wall of the Surrey Quays Warehouse which held the now legendary Freeze exhibition curated by Hirst as an undergraduate student at Goldsmith’s in 1988, Hirst’s very earliest Spot Paintings adopted a very similar format to the present work, both Row and Edge featuring the line of cropped spots used to dynamic effect here.

 

The cornerstone of Hirst’s practice, The Spot Paintings allow the artist to balance mathematical precision with his obvious joy for colour, developing a harmonious system ‘where colour can exist on its own, interacting with other colours in a perfect format.’ⁱⁱⁱ

 

Damien Hirst, interviewed for Time on the occasion of his 2012 Gagosian show

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• Coming to prominence in the late 1980s as part of the group identified by collector and gallerist Charles Saatchi as a generation of ‘Young British Artists’, Damien Hirst is best known for his boundary-pushing sculptures of animals submerged in formaldehyde, his series of medicine cabinets, and his celebrated Spot Paintings.

 

• Executed in 1995, the same year that Hirst was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize, the present work represents a key moment in the artist’s career.

 

• Since 1988 when the artist curated his seminal Freeze exhibition including work from his Goldsmith’s peer group, Hirst has continued to exhibit internationally, with major shows at Tate Modern in London and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Examples of his work can be found in major institutions including the Tate, London; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; The Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

 

• Most recently, Hirst’s Spot Paintings have been reimagined once again with his series of Veil Paintings, a looser, more gestural treatment of the motif that nevertheless still adheres to the same basic principles of the foundational series as an investigation into chromatic behaviour. 

ⁱ Michael Bracewell, ‘Art Without the Angst’, in Jason Beard and Millicent Willner, ed., Damien Hirst, The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011, London, 2013, n.p. 
ⁱⁱ  Damien Hirst, quoted in The Complete Spot Paintings: 1986 – 2011, London, 2012, p. 822. 
ⁱⁱⁱ Damien Hirst, quoted in Damien Hirst and Gordon Burn, On the Way to Work, London, 2001, p. 119.