“A veil is a barrier, a curtain between two things, something that you can look at and pass through, it’s solid yet invisible and reveals and yet obscures the truth, the thing that we are searching for.”
—Damien Hirst
“Gagosian will present Damien Hirst’s latest series, “The Veil Paintings” as the 2018 Oscars show, a much-anticipated annual fixture in the Los Angeles cultural calendar. Hirst’s last exhibition in Los Angeles was “The Complete Spot Paintings” in 2012.
Following “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable,” his highly ambitious sculpture exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana in Venice last year, Hirst was drawn towards the immediacy of painting and a return to the studio. This new series takes the Visual Candy paintings of the 1990s as a point of departure and embraces color and gestural painting on a large scale. Referencing both Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, “The Veil Paintings” layer brushstrokes and bright dabs of heavy impasto, enveloping the viewer in vast fields of color.
Inspired partly by the Pointillist innovations of Georges Seurat and the post-Impressionist paintings of Pierre Bonnard, Hirst continues his examination of color and its effect on the eye in “The Veil Paintings.” While in the Spot Paintings and Medicine Cabinet series, his use of color was contained within the formality of the grid and the minimalist pharmaceutical packaging, here it is given free reign, with joyous results.
“The Veil Paintings” coincides with “Colour Space,” a solo exhibition of new paintings from 2016 and sculptures at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, England (March 25–July 15, 2018).
Damien Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol, England, and lives and works in London and Devon. Collections include The Broad, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; Tate, London; Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt am Main; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donna Regina (MADRE), Naples; Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M), Madrid; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo; Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), Glasgow; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA), Moscow; and 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan. Institutional exhibitions include “For the Love of God,” Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (2008, traveled to the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence in 2010); “No Love Lost,” Wallace Collection, London (2009); “Requiem,” PinchukArtCenter, Kiev (2009); “Cornucopia,” Oceanographic Museum of Monaco (2010); Tate Modern, London (2012); “Relics,” Qatar Museums Authority, Al Riwaq, Qatar (2013); “Signification (Hope, Immortality and Death in Paris, Now and Then),” Deyrolle, Paris (2014); Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo (2015); “Damien Hirst: New Religion,” Museum of Contemporary Art of Republika of Srpska, Banja Luka, Bosnia & Herzegovina (2016, traveled to Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, Novi Sad, Serbia); “Damien Hirst: The Last Supper,” National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2016); and “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable,” Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana, François Pinault Foundation, Venice (2017). Hirst received the Turner Prize in 1995.”
