Damien Hirst Dishes Out Minimal ‘Veil’ Artworks He Personally Painted By Hand
Image via HENI
As many as 300 art lovers will soon be able to own work wholly painted by the hand of Damien Hirst himself.
Fans will likely be familiar with the English artist’s Veil paintings, a series of canvas works abundantly specked with layers upon layers of paint brush dots, as if Georges Seurat and Pierre Bonnard had feverishly painted them themselves. Given that the project was labor-intensive and required waiting for the paint to dry, it involved the work of several assistants.
Hirst latest dot paintings are a one man’s job. Paper Veils, as suggested in the name, take after the colorful Veil paintings. These smaller iterations, however, are “pare[d] down,” making it possible for Hirst to single-handedly finish them. Work on Paper Veils began back in 2019.
The Paper Veils, depicted in oil and in 100 large and 200 small sizes, are now on view for free at HENI’s London Soho gallery, in tandem with a presale running through December 6. The pair most recently teamed up to launch Hirst into the world of non-fungible tokens, in which he’d prepared physical and digital copies of paintings and gave buyers the choice to burn the real-world ones.
Like peering into a sky full of stars, the more you gaze at the brushstrokes, the more new meanings will surface. The mini-mes of Veils portray a cluster of vibrant brushstrokes as “constellations” with “seemingly infinite layers… which—like a veil—appear to both reveal and obscure,” describes the art gallery.
Hirst hopes the Paper Veils will elicit a similar effect to that of the momentous Veil works. “I want you to get lost in them, I want you to fall into them,” he said of the original series. “I want them to delight your eyes and make you want to stay in the painting.”
The dots in Paper Veils possess a constant state of transformation. They could appear “like the stars in the Milky Way or like details of plants,” notes Hirst. And then: “Exploding fireworks in the sky or fields of colorful countryside seen from the air.”
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Fans will need to fill out a form to express their interest to purchase the Paper Veil paintings, which are priced at US$45,000 (plus applicable taxes) for the large ones and US$25,000 for the smaller ones. In their application, collectors will note down three of their preferred artworks, describe their personal art collection, and state their method of payment, for review by HENI.
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[via Artnet News and Fad Magazine, images via various sources]
