Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst’s Spot paintings reduce painting to a deceptively simple system: colored circles arranged at regular intervals against a pale ground. Initiated in 1986, the series became one of the defining bodies of work associated with the Young British Artists, joining the visual language of pharmaceutical packaging, laboratory order, industrial production, and modernist abstraction. Although governed by strict parameters, the paintings vary enormously in scale, density, chromatic intensity, and the size of their constituent spots. Their tension lies in the contrast between apparent mechanical perfection and the physical fact of paint, between serial repetition and the unpredictable effects produced when one color is placed beside another.

Published by Other Criteria and Gagosian in conjunction with the 2012 exhibition staged simultaneously across eleven Gagosian locations, this substantial catalogue documents every Spot painting produced between 1986 and 2011, with more than 99 percent of the works illustrated. Approximately 1,500 paintings are organized chronologically and by classification, accompanied by installation photographs and related Spot objects. The volume includes essays by Ann Temkin, Michael Bracewell, and Robert Pincus-Witten, a conversation between Hirst, John Baldessari, and Ed Ruscha, and a text by the artist. Presented as a 1,074-page hardcover in a slipcase, it remains the most comprehensive published record of this central series.