Damien Hirst The Virtues For Sale

The Virtues is a series of eight laminated giclee prints created by the Hirst in 2021. The print series is a version of Hirst’s hugely popular Cherry Blossoms painting series, which the artist devoted three years to producing. The beautiful national flowers of Japan are as marvellous in print as they are in paint, and are symbolic of beauty, transience and renewal. The title of the series honours an early 18th Century book by Nitobe Inazo concerning Japanese Ethics titled The Soul of Japan. Each print is named after a virtue as outlined in the text: Justice, Courage, Mercy, Politeness, Honesty, Honour, Loyalty and Control. 

All examples in the suite feature a different blue sky and branches, but they all united in their pastel splodges of blossoms, which simultaneously recall the painterly styles of pointillism and impressionism as well as action painting. In this way, they lie in between representational and abstract art, referencing art historical movements that seem to conflict one another . As an ardent lover of colour, the experience of  creating Cherry Blossoms relates to freedom in his practice: ‘They’re garish and messy and fragile and about me moving away from Minimalism and the idea of an imaginary mechanical painter and that’s so exciting for me.” The ‘messiness’ referenced by the artist is acutely felt in the all-surrounding, impasto and layered nature of the painted blossoms which often obscure the branches and detract from the sky. For Japanese art historian these works occupy ‘A delirious space of pleasure and fear...that puts the viewer at the centre of a silent but spiralling blizzard.’ This tension between pleasure or joy and fear is a typically Hirstean one, as the artist is known for often exploring symbols related to death such as animals in formaldehyde, or diamond-encrusted skulls. Whilst The Virtues at first may seem a firm departure from these rather morbid subjects, the cherry blossoms still contain the all-important life and death duality that is at the heart of Hirst’s oeuvre. Cherry blossom viewing in Japan lasts all of two weeks before they wilt: therefore the blossoms are an emblem of time passing, and the anxiety of their fleeting nature is perhaps expressed in the immediacy of Hirst’s application.