Damien Hirst at Gagosian
Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Eleanor Heartney
If these paintings were not affixed with the name Damien Hirst, would there have been such crowds thronging the gallery? Much is being made of the fact that Hirst, former enfant terrible, has moved from his trademark dead animals, faux pharmacies and science-museum displays into oil painting. But this being Hirst, these are not, of course, simply old-fashioned paintings. Instead the artist enlisted his legion of assistants to create a set of deliberately uninflected images based on morbid and grisly subjects from photojournalistic sources. As has been pointed out ad nauseam, such imagery is an extension of Hirst's established themes, among them death, altered states of consciousness, pathology and corruption.
But whatever their place in his oeuvre, the new works must stand or fall on their own. On that score, it's hard to imagine these photorealist paintings making a stir without their brand name. There is a painting of a blood-streaked car windshield moments after a suicide bombing, a series of portraits tracing the downward spiral of a crack-addicted woman and an image of a hospital technician thrusting an autopsied brain before us like a ritual offering. There are also some works bearing imagery that seems to hail from Hirst's earlier, more conceptual days: several large-scale versions of pharmaceutical packaging can be read as jaunty geometric compositions referencing modernist painting, some crisp paintings of various pills and capsules multiplied by the reflective metallic shelves on which they rest and, unaccountably, several paintings of cut and uncut gems.
Because Hirst relies on others to do most of the work (he claims that he does the finishing), the paintings display a range of skill and precision. Among the few that linger in the mind are two depictions of empty rooms where absence turns out to be more powerful than the graphic splashes of blood and gore that ornament so many other works here. One of these is Hospital Corridor (2004), which depicts the yellowish walls and shiny waxed floors of a long institutional hallway. The other is Mortuary (2003-04), which presents the sanitary walls and gleaming metal surfaces of an unpeopled morgue.
As an outsider turned insider, Hirst is savvy about his choice of subject and approach. The lackluster photorealist style of the paintings is in keeping with the renewed interest in photography-based painting. The subject matter is equally fashionable--reflecting a preoccupation with mortality, escapism and Goth-style gloom that has been increasingly visible in large group surveys of late.
But in the end, this was a presold and predigested event. It hardly seems to matter that the critics have universally savaged this show. Hirst is Hirst, even when he's not.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group
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