Damien Hirst 12 Woodcut Spots For Sale

12 Woodcut Spots is a series of 12 woodcut prints created by the artist in 2010. Part of the artist’s spot works, which have become synonymous with Hirst, these works show the spots in the medium of relief printing rather than painting. Hirst created his first spot painting in 1986, and has since made over a thousand – making it one of the most important visual concerns in his body of work.  

As with The Pharmaceutical Paintings, the wider series of spot works, each of the twelve woodcuts is titled after a pharmaceutical drug found in Hirst’s copy of The Physician’s Desk Reference. Each print features a seemingly perfect, precise spots arranged in a grid form, aside from Quinaldic Acid and Pridinol which feature single spots. In these striking and unsettling formations, Hirst affirms the visual power of minimalism, asserting that ‘The simplest, cleanest thing can provoke an emotional response.’ This cleanness, like the pharmaceutical references of the series, is artificial in its striving for perfection, creating an illusion of faultlessly measured and distanced circles. Hirst’s geometric and scientific approach to the spots can be seen as a classic marker of modernism and conceptualism – art historian Rosalind Krauss devoted an essay to grids, arguing that ‘Flattened, geometricised, ordered, it is antinatural.. It is what art looks like when it turns its back to nature.’ Though Hirst’s method may be unnatural, the spots are nevertheless beautiful, exemplifying his strength in seriality and colour. Each example in the series showcases the spots in differing proportions and colours: Fluoroiodobenzene features the most dots, of the smallest size, and mesmerises us with its hues. Meanwhile, the four by four, widely spaced grid of Cocarboxylase demonstrates some of the brightest, child-like colours of the series with primary reds and neon coral. Although the series features many of the same base colours, none of the shades are repeated, and thus they are all truly unique and expertly mixed. For Hirst, granting these apparently simple spots on a plain background creates a ‘harmony where colour can exist on its own, interacting with other colours in a perfect format’.