Unique work. Signed ‘Hirst’ on the lower edge and registered in the Damien Hirst Archive under no. DHS 2344.

Created in 2005, Beautiful, I Pushed the Controls and Ahead of Me Rockets Blazed, I Don’t Want to be a Dead Artist Painting is a monumental example of Damien Hirst’s celebrated Spin Paintings. Extending more than two metres in diameter, the work was produced by applying household gloss paint and metallic enamel to a rapidly rotating circular canvas. The resulting centrifugal movement carried the paint outwards in radiating streams, combining an element of mechanical control with the unpredictable behaviour of liquid colour.

Vivid passages of paint emerge from the centre and expand across the circular support, producing an image that appears simultaneously explosive and gravitational. Embedded credit cards interrupt the painted surface, their rigid rectangular forms contrasting with the fluid movement surrounding them. The objects are absorbed into the composition while remaining immediately recognisable as instruments of commerce, credit and consumption.

Hirst began producing Spin Paintings in the early 1990s, developing a process inspired partly by the spin-painting machines encountered at childhood fairs. By replacing conventional brushwork with rotation, gravity and chance, he challenged established ideas of artistic control and authorship while retaining responsibility for the materials, colours and conditions through which each painting emerged. The works engage with the gestural legacy of Abstract Expressionism, but substitute the artist’s expressive movement with the impersonal action of a machine.

The inclusion of credit cards connects the physical production of the painting with Hirst’s sustained examination of money, value and the commercial structures surrounding contemporary art. These everyday financial objects become both material components and cultural symbols, drawing attention to the relationship between artistic and monetary value. The work’s characteristically expansive title reinforces this tension, combining technological exhilaration with an anxious insistence upon creative vitality and the desire to avoid becoming a ‘dead artist’.

A detailed condition report is available upon request.