Co-organised by fellow artist Angus Fairhurst during the pair’s second year at art school, the 1988 Freeze exhibition featured the first examples of what would go on to be named Hirst’s ‘Spot’ paintings. Row (1988) and Edge (1988) were painted directly onto the repurposed walls of an empty Port of London Authority building in the Docklands area, where the seminal and career-defining showcase took place. Exhibited alongside the work of 16 other Young British Artists, including Tracey Emin, these works comprised a grid-like arrangement of different coloured spots. The works at the Freeze exhibition were an important conceptual bridging point between three-dimensional installations, such as Boxes (1988), and Hirst’s two-dimensional works.
Row and Edge place graphic simplicity and colour centre stage, defining the conceptual and compositional ‘rules’ for all of Hirst’s subsequent ‘Spot’ paintings. Following the early Spot works, no two colours were to be alike, and the dots were to be perfectly circular, evenly-spaced, and arranged in a grid-like pattern. Unlike their successors, however, these early works were conceived in a manner far from ‘precise’; daubed in an expressive mode that referenced American Abstract Expressionism, coloured paint dripped freely down the walls of Freeze in a fashion that foreshadowed Hirst’s later ‘Spin’ paintings. The perplexing juxtaposition between the ‘Spot’ paintings and Hirst’s disturbing, death-obsessed installation pieces has long been clear for all to see: when he first saw the now iconic A Thousand Years (1990), it is reported that Lucian Freud turned to Hirst and remarked, bemusedly, “I think you started with the final act, my dear.”
Some of the most sought after Spot prints were published in 2000, in collaboration with the online contemporary art gallery Eyestorm. The three limited edition Pharmaceutical Spot prints were named after drugs that were both taboo and highly recognisable to an artworld audience: Valium, Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) and Opium.
We asked specialist and CEO of Eyestorm, Henrik Riis, why Spot prints continue to hold their immense significance and popular appeal – he explains, “I think the popularity of the Spots stems from that they are so visibly easy to understand for many people. From a communication perspective they are simple. Most people do not know the story behind the series, but they instantly know that a Spot print is a Hirst. This is what gives them their ‘wow’ factor and why so many people want to hang them in their homes.”
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