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8 1/10 × 20 in (20.6 × 50.8 cm)
From a limited edition of 55.
Excellent condition, ‘as new’. Sold float mounted and framed to a museum quality standard in a white box frame, using archival materials.
Hand-signed by artist, recto. Hand numbered verso.
Notes: ‘I’ve always had a phenomenal love of colour… So that’s where the spot paintings came from … It was just a way of pinning down the joy of colour’ – Damien Hirst.
The spot paintings are amongst Hirst’s most widely recognised works. Of the thirteen sub-series within the spots category, the ‘Pharmaceutical’ paintings are the first and most prolific. There are over 1000 in existence, dating from 1986 to 2011.
His array of spot woodcut prints are essays in pure colour. At the same time they reference families of pharmacological drugs, an aspect of his well-documented obsession with medicine’s attempts to control and arrest bodily decay, itself linked to themes of death, science, religion and art in his work as a whole.
In 1988, during the third and final stage of ‘Freeze’, Hirst painted two near-identical arrangements of coloured spots onto the wall of the warehouse. He called the works ‘Edge’ (1988) and ‘Row’ (1988). These paintings followed some loose hand-painted spots on board, dating from 1986, and the first spot work on canvas ‘Untitled (with Black Dot)’ (1988) – the only ‘Pharmaceutical’ painting ever to have incorporated a black dot.
