The Cherry Blossoms are about attractiveness and lifestyle and demise. They are extreme—there’s a thing practically tacky about them. […] They are attractive but taken from mother nature. […] They are garish and messy and fragile and about me transferring absent from Minimalism and the concept of an imaginary mechanical painter and that is so thrilling for me. – Damien Hirst
The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, will unveil thirty paintings from Cherry Blossoms, Damien Hirst’s outstanding new sequence of 107 full performs, from July 6, 2021, to January 2, 2022.
Cherry Blossoms is Damien Hirst’s initial museum exhibition in France. The Cherry Blossoms series reinterprets, with playful irony, the standard subject matter of landscape portray. Hirst combines thick brushstrokes and things of gestural portray,
referencing equally Impressionism and Pointillism, as perfectly as Motion Painting. The monumental canvases, which are fully lined in dense vivid colors, envelope the viewer in a vast floral landscape moving involving figuration and abstraction. The Cherry Blossoms are at when a subversion and homage to the great inventive actions of the late nineteenth and twentieth hundreds of years. They are integral to the pictorial exploration lengthy carried out by Hirst. In his London studio, the artist describes “diving into the paintings and entirely blitzing them from one particular conclusion to the other”.
He also talks about doing the job on various canvases at the exact same time and frequently returning to these, which he held shut by, months following their completion. Right after devoting three full yrs to the sequence, Damien Hirst finished the Cherry Blossoms series in November 2020: “[The pandemic] has presented me a great deal additional time to reside with the paintings, and glimpse at them, and make completely specified that everything’s concluded.”
“They are about need and how we method the factors all over us and what we turn them into, but also about the insane visual transience of beauty—a tree in whole mad blossom versus a crystal clear sky. It’s been so good to make them, to be totally lost in colour and in paint in my studio,” Hirst claims of the series.
The total sequence includes 107 canvases (all reproduced in the exhibition catalogue), divided into solitary panels, diptychs, triptychs, quadriptychs, and even a hexaptych, all huge-structure.
The exhibition, a response to an invitation by Hervé Chandès, Typical Director of the Fondation Cartier, to Damien Hirst all through a conference in London in 2019, provides thirty paintings chosen by Hervé Chandès and the artist. Getting around the place created by Jean Nouvel, the canvases, lined in thick, vibrant paint, absorb the spectator into the paintings.
Immediately after studying in Leeds, Damien Hirst entered Goldsmiths University in London in 1986 and rapidly became the facial area of the Youthful British Artists, a team with a taste for experimentation and creating art seen as provocative by some. They dominated the British arts scene in the 1990s. Hirst’s Pure History collection — in which animals appear in formaldehydefilled tanks — shortly grew to become emblematic of his function.
Having said that, portray has generally played an vital job in Hirst’s perform: “I’ve experienced a romance with portray all my lifetime, even if I averted it. As a younger artist, you respond to the context, your scenario. In the 1980s, portray was not seriously the way to go.”
If his early canvases were influenced by Abstract Expressionism, which he refers to as a “paint how you feel” solution, in 1986 he commenced a series acknowledged as Location Paintings, wherever colored dots, which seem to have been painted by a machine, erase all traces of human intervention. To begin with conceived as an ongoing sequence, nowadays, the Place Paintings incorporate in excess of one particular thousand canvases of varying sizes and titles. In distinction with the mathematical infinity of the Spot Paintings, the Visible Sweet paintings (1993-1995), ironically named right after a scathing remark by an art critic who claimed the paintings appeared like curtain
types, are characterised by their thick smudges of paint and exuberant superimposed colors.
More recently, the series known as Color Area (2016), a variation close to the infinite possibility of color, and Veil Paintings (2018), wherever dabs of paint shimmer and deal with the whole canvas, celebrate the painting surface, depth and coloration. This exploration culminates in the Cherry Blossoms.
For the exhibition, many films had been built in collaboration with Damien Hirst. A medium-duration film, shot more than quite a few months, allows spectators to uncover the ambiance of the artist’s Thames-aspect studio. A 2nd film, shot in 360°, makes it possible for viewers, guided by Damien Hirst’s voice, to discover a further of his studios. Both movies can be watched on the web for the duration of the exhibition.
An exhibition catalogue will be out there in summer 2021.