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last chance to see: damien hirst visual candy and natural history

Damien Hirst's infamous shark, philosophically titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, (1991), remains the contemporary art world's supreme statement-maker. A monumental two fingers and colossal set of gnashers levelled at what had become Britain's mostly dull, predictable and hierarchical art ecosystem, Hirst literally and metaphorically set out to attack the blubbered elite's complacency with this streamline killing-machine of the deep, chillingly stuck on infinite pause. 

Told by a dealer that a young British artist couldn't expect to sell a work - no matter how significant or substantial - for more than GBP10,000, a provoked Hirst smelled art's capitalistic blood and went hunting the money trail. He responded with the pickled predator and sold it to Iraqi-British businessman Charles Saatchi for a staggering GBP50,000. [The specimen, a tiger shark caught off Australia at Hirst's behest, cost GBP6,000]. Detractors said the shark wasn't art and that its title sounded more like literature or poetry. Would Shark: Self Portrait, or Greatest Hit, have been equally compelling titles for the work; or the more surreal, Magritte-esque, This is not a shark? Whatever the visual versus vernacular debate, the creature and the casserole of formaldehyde-d fauna that followed came long before Britain's Tate Modern ever got split into two parts - and Hirst's shark now into three at Gagosian Hong Kong. Seeing it again (this writer saw the original in 1991) even though a smaller specimen than the statement-maker, it still raises the hairs on the back. Entombed yet our tomb simultaneously; an ecstatic agony. And curiously contemporary. 

In Roman times, Pliny the Elder wrote of the shark in his Natural History, calling the animal canis marines (dog of the sea). It wasn't until the sixteenth century that new words to describe the selachian terror appeared in French, Spanish and English. And the devouring marine demon we recognise today is a peculiarly modern invention; aided, abetted and famously commercialised by director Steven Spielberg in Jaws (1975). 

But one man beat Hirst and Spielberg to it; American artist and oil painter John Singleton Copley. He painted Watson and the Shark (1778), which depicts the real-life 1749 rescue of a 14-year-old British cabin boy, Brook Watson, who was attacked while swimming in the sea in Havana, Cuba and rescued by his boat crew. Somewhat miraculously, Watson only lost one foot, and went on to become the Lord Mayor of London, albeit one who hobbled around on a wooden leg. Copley and Watson became good friends and it was the latter who commissioned him to create the work. Reaction to Copley's romanticised yet shocking rendition of the nautical contretemps was no less boisterous than that which greeted Hirst 200 years later. Sharks were art then, moreso now. 

But it's not all gills, guts and gore. Hirst's shark forms part of Visual Candy & Natural History, thirty-two works of his paintings and sculptures from the early- to mid-1990s. Since emerging onto the international art scene in the late 1980s as the protagonist of a generation of creatives, the English psycho of the Brit-art set, Hirst created installations, sculptures, paintings and drawings that examine the complex relationships between art, beauty, religion, science, life and death. Through mediums as diverse as household paint, butterfly wings, cow's heads and flies, he has investigated and challenged contemporary belief systems, tracing the uncertainties that lie at the heart of human experience. 

The Candy paintings are joyous, colourful abstractions, which allude to movements including Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, while the Natural History sculptures – glass tanks containing biological specimens preserved in formaldehyde – reflect the visceral and clinical realities of scientific investigation through minimalist design. Despite their stark formal differences, the two series were made during the same period and share conceptual foundations: an exploration of the relationships between pleasure and pain, transience and permanence, logic and emotion.

The Candy works revel in colour and pattern through an informal, nostalgic painting technique, which stands in opposition to the mechanical application of colour in Hirst’s spot paintings, which followed later. 

Visual Candy takes its title from Hirst's 1993 exhibition at Regan Projects in Los Angeles. It resulted from an art critic branding the spot paintings 'just visual candy' which Hirst couldn't shake from his head. Ultimately, the show boasts some of Hirst's most iconic pieces, expressing what the artist describes as: "That failure of trying so hard to do something that you destroy the thing that you're trying to preserve." 

Go get thee to Gagosian and take a final bite. 

Until March 3. Gagosian Hong Kong, 7/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong

IMAGES: (From top): Damien Hirst - Myth Explored, Explained, Exploded, 1993-199; Courtesy Gagosian. Artworks @ Damien Hirst and Science Ltd; John Singleton Copley - Watson and the Shark, 1778, Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington. D.C.; Damien Hirst - Happiness, 1993-94; Courtesy Gagosian. Artworks @ Damien Hirst and Science Ltd

Admin

last chance to see: damien hirst visual candy and natural history

Damien Hirst's infamous shark, philosophically titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, (1991), remains the contemporary art world's supreme statement-maker. A monumental two fingers and colossal set of gnashers levelled at what had become Britain's mostly dull, predictable and hierarchical art ecosystem, Hirst literally and metaphorically set out to attack the blubbered elite's complacency with this streamline killing-machine of the deep, chillingly stuck on infinite pause. 

Told by a dealer that a young British artist couldn't expect to sell a work - no matter how significant or substantial - for more than GBP10,000, a provoked Hirst smelled art's capitalistic blood and went hunting the money trail. He responded with the pickled predator and sold it to Iraqi-British businessman Charles Saatchi for a staggering GBP50,000. [The specimen, a tiger shark caught off Australia at Hirst's behest, cost GBP6,000]. Detractors said the shark wasn't art and that its title sounded more like literature or poetry. Would Shark: Self Portrait, or Greatest Hit, have been equally compelling titles for the work; or the more surreal, Magritte-esque, This is not a shark? Whatever the visual versus vernacular debate, the creature and the casserole of formaldehyde-d fauna that followed came long before Britain's Tate Modern ever got split into two parts - and Hirst's shark now into three at Gagosian Hong Kong. Seeing it again (this writer saw the original in 1991) even though a smaller specimen than the statement-maker, it still raises the hairs on the back. Entombed yet our tomb simultaneously; an ecstatic agony. And curiously contemporary. 

In Roman times, Pliny the Elder wrote of the shark in his Natural History, calling the animal canis marines (dog of the sea). It wasn't until the sixteenth century that new words to describe the selachian terror appeared in French, Spanish and English. And the devouring marine demon we recognise today is a peculiarly modern invention; aided, abetted and famously commercialised by director Steven Spielberg in Jaws (1975). 

But one man beat Hirst and Spielberg to it; American artist and oil painter John Singleton Copley. He painted Watson and the Shark (1778), which depicts the real-life 1749 rescue of a 14-year-old British cabin boy, Brook Watson, who was attacked while swimming in the sea in Havana, Cuba and rescued by his boat crew. Somewhat miraculously, Watson only lost one foot, and went on to become the Lord Mayor of London, albeit one who hobbled around on a wooden leg. Copley and Watson became good friends and it was the latter who commissioned him to create the work. Reaction to Copley's romanticised yet shocking rendition of the nautical contretemps was no less boisterous than that which greeted Hirst 200 years later. Sharks were art then, moreso now. 

But it's not all gills, guts and gore. Hirst's shark forms part of Visual Candy & Natural History, thirty-two works of his paintings and sculptures from the early- to mid-1990s. Since emerging onto the international art scene in the late 1980s as the protagonist of a generation of creatives, the English psycho of the Brit-art set, Hirst created installations, sculptures, paintings and drawings that examine the complex relationships between art, beauty, religion, science, life and death. Through mediums as diverse as household paint, butterfly wings, cow's heads and flies, he has investigated and challenged contemporary belief systems, tracing the uncertainties that lie at the heart of human experience. 

The Candy paintings are joyous, colourful abstractions, which allude to movements including Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, while the Natural History sculptures – glass tanks containing biological specimens preserved in formaldehyde – reflect the visceral and clinical realities of scientific investigation through minimalist design. Despite their stark formal differences, the two series were made during the same period and share conceptual foundations: an exploration of the relationships between pleasure and pain, transience and permanence, logic and emotion.

The Candy works revel in colour and pattern through an informal, nostalgic painting technique, which stands in opposition to the mechanical application of colour in Hirst’s spot paintings, which followed later. 

Visual Candy takes its title from Hirst's 1993 exhibition at Regan Projects in Los Angeles. It resulted from an art critic branding the spot paintings 'just visual candy' which Hirst couldn't shake from his head. Ultimately, the show boasts some of Hirst's most iconic pieces, expressing what the artist describes as: "That failure of trying so hard to do something that you destroy the thing that you're trying to preserve." 

Go get thee to Gagosian and take a final bite. 

Until March 3. Gagosian Hong Kong, 7/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong

IMAGES: (From top): Damien Hirst - Myth Explored, Explained, Exploded, 1993-199; Courtesy Gagosian. Artworks @ Damien Hirst and Science Ltd; John Singleton Copley - Watson and the Shark, 1778, Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington. D.C.; Damien Hirst - Happiness, 1993-94; Courtesy Gagosian. Artworks @ Damien Hirst and Science Ltd

Admin