Damien Hirst creating his 90 paintings, including diptychs and triptychs © Prudence Cumings
After nearly two years in the studio, Damien Hirst has announced he is due to exhibit his Cherry Blossom oil paintings at the Fondation Cartier in Paris next June.
Hirst revealed his plans for the show on Instagram on Monday, posting videos of him in his Hammersmith studio daubing candy pink blotches on chocolate boughs against powder blue backgrounds. There are 90 works in the series, although it is not clear whether all will be shown in France. Full details are due to be announced in mid-November.
The former YBA, who spent almost ten years working on his 2017 Venice show, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, before returning to painting says he is “working like mad” to complete the cycle, which includes diptychs and triptychs. Meanwhile, Hirst will continue to post videos “to show you how much fun Im having in the studio”. He says he feels “like a kid in a sweet shop, cant stop painting!”, adding: “Who said cherry blossoms are dark?”
Back in May, Hirst told The Art Newspaper that he “hopes you can see the irony [in the paintings] as well, because they feel like theyre celebrations of avoiding something”. With this in mind, perhaps, in another Instagram post he says: “Theres something dumb about the beauty of cherry blossom.” The socialite Paris Hilton, who appears to be a fan, simply replies: “Beautiful”.
Hirst, who decided to create the whole Cherry Blossom series before unleashing them on the art world, say he was last painting in around 2008 when his friend Angus Fairhurst killed himself. “I was painting those really dark blue paintings—theyre very derivative, like Bacons—and I was feeling like I was in 1953 and wondering what the hell I was doing. It got worse after my friend committed suicide,” he says. For almost ten years after that, Hirst threw himself into the production of Treasures, which cost a reported $65m.
Just before that show opened, Hirst rented his London studio “and then it just exploded”. Even then, however, the idea to paint cherry blossoms “seemed really taRead More – Source
