Damien Hirst’s exhibitions open in the spring at the Villa Borghese in Rome and at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris. We tell why the artist again returns to his old ideas and insists on being right
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Who is Hirst?
Artist, sculptor, curator, collector, entrepreneur – the list is long. In the 1990s, he sold a shark in formaldehyde to Charles Saatchi, at the turn of the millennium he opened the Pharmacy restaurant, in 2008, bypassing the galleries, he organized a Sotheby’s auction dedicated to his own work, four years later, in the early 2010s, took over all branches of the Gagosian gallery, exhibiting a series of works of Spot Paintings, and in 2017 with François Pinault (No.27 in the global Forbes rating, $ 44.1 billion) organized the exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable that challenged the Venice Biennale. Hirst’s three years of quiet looks like a well-timed pause before his triumphant return to the art scene. They sang a requiem for it and in 2008, after the auction,
Exhibition “Treasures from the sunken ship” Incredible “in Venice in 2017. / Getty Images
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He returned with the start of the lockdown, when the confused community was quiet for a while. Hirst came to Instagram with daily posts about his work, began a partnership with Snapchat, allowing users to create their own versions of his Spin Paintings in augmented reality, and donated the proceeds to support the charity Partners in Help. In support of the NHS, he created Butterfly Rainbow, a work that anyone can print and display in a window in solidarity with UK healthcare professionals. The money from the sale of the limited edition went directly to the NHS fund.
Why Hirst?
If anyone has big plans for 2021, it is Damien Hirst. It kicked off with an exhibition in Switzerland called Mental Escapology. In June, Paris will show a new series of “Cherry Blossoms” (Cherry Blossoms) at the Foundation for Contemporary Art Cartier (Hirst’s first exhibition at a museum institution in France), which he defends the title of artist and pays tribute to pointillists.
Exhibition in Switzerland “Mental Escapology” (Mental Escapology). 2021 / Felix Friedmann / © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. / DR
All roads lead to Rome, and this is probably why Hirst is going to add his works from the collection “Treasures from the sunken ship“ Incredible ”to the world heritage right there, in the Borghese gallery. And at the beginning of the year, Hirst took over as curator at the Gagosian Gallery, and these are just some of the planned projects against the backdrop of the pandemic, when most of the museums are quarantined.
In 2017, François Pinault, a longtime collector of Hirst’s work and patron of his Venetian exhibitions in Punta della Dogana and Palazzo Grassi, financed the creation of the Treasures from the Sunken Ship Incredible exhibition. “Treasures”, the fruit of joint efforts, should have been a triumph for both. Hirst’s long-awaited project, almost 10 years in length, was due to launch a year before the opening of the Bourse de Commerce, a museum that Pinault planned to open in the former building of the Paris Stock Exchange and which would rival the Louis Vuitton foundation. But the work dragged on, the opening was postponed. And in 2021, both heroes decided to emerge from the water. Pinault planned to open the Bourse de Commerce this year, and Hirst – once again to show the entire art world who he is.
Can you trust Hirst?
The strength of Hirst’s successful works lies in their ability to appeal to the memories of every viewer, regardless of their involvement in art. Hirst takes understandable plots and turns them into an artistic statement, into a recognizable speech, with which he addresses the beholder. Dead butterflies, gothic ornaments of butterfly wings, halved calves, sheep on a cross, sharks in formaldehyde aquariums, drugstore cabinets filled with medicines, a dissector’s office – no one has yet managed to present death in all the details so aesthetically attractively.
sharks in formaldehyde aquariums, pharmacy cabinets filled with medicines, a dissector’s office – no one has yet managed to present death in all the details so aesthetically attractively. / Getty Images
In 2017, with his “Treasures”, Hirst sought to stop time, to “museumize” it. Placing the cities slipping from the surface of the earth in the windows, he thereby predicted the future, slowed down the very course of life, as if he had fixed the feeling we are living now.
The exhibition is based on a legend according to which in 2008 the treasures of Seth Amotan II, a freed slave from northern Turkey who lived at the turn of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD and who amassed incredible wealth, were discovered at the bottom of the ocean off the coast of East Africa. His entire collection of artifacts and jewelry was loaded onto the ship Incredible, which sank off the African coast. Underwater archaeologists managed to find and raise to the surface more than a hundred objects: giant sculptures of sea deities decorated with corals and colored stones, golden monkeys, lizards and turtles, a goddess with a face resembling Kate Moss, a marble pharaoh that strongly resembles Rihanna, and a bronze statue of Mickey -Mausa, overgrown with seashells and corals.
Why now?
The Venice exhibition was initially regarded by critics as a commercial project. ArtNet columnist Kenny Schachter, in his review, argued that the Treasures project is nothing more than a pre-auction exhibition on the eve of the auction, especially since Hirst’s patron Francois Pinault, according to the BBC, who invested about £ 50 million in the project, is the owner of Christie’s. According to The New York Times, collectors who asked the price for works during the Biennale were given numbers in the $ 0.5-5 million range.
Monumental Demon with a Bowl at the Treasures exhibition in Venice. / Getty Images
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Curator Francesco Bonami, who worked on the Hirst exhibition in Doha, told The New York Times that the Venice show was “beyond good and evil.” And he added: Hirst, in his characteristic impudent manner, has created a narrative that looks like kitsch and bad taste, but this is “something more, this is Hollywood.” According to artist Andrey Molodkin, head of TheFoundry studio, “Mickey Mouses, drowned under water, is Hirst’s visionary understanding that culture as a territory of freedom, dissent is over, and only commerce remains.”
“Treasures from“ The Incredible ”are the dreams of Ovid and Heinrich Schliemann, taken together, which have come true, they were joined by elements of modern culture. This baroque eclecticism mingled the head of Medusa, which makes one remember Caravaggio, and the shield of Achilles, Dürer’s “Praying Hands” and Kate Moss. “The exhibition in Venice was the first show. It was fundamentally important to emphasize the breadth of references to existing works, mythology, cinematography, literature, popular iconography, modern images, ”curator of the exhibition Elena Dzheuna told Forbes Life.
How did you come up with all this?
Elena Djeuna is not only a long-term curator of Hirst’s exhibitions, but also an old friend of François Pinault. “We first met in the nineties, when I was European director of post-war and contemporary art at Sotheby’s in London,” said Elena Jeuna. – Since 2000, I started working with François Pinault as a consultant. At the same time, I have worked on independent exhibition projects such as Versailles by Jeff Koons (2008), Arte Povera (2009) and Lucho Fontana (2019) at MAMM in Moscow. I was very pleased with our project with Rudolf Stingel at Palazzo Grassi in 2012, where in 2016 I became one of the curators of the last solo exhibition of Sigmar Polke. ”
Damien Hirst, Elena Geuna and François Pinault at the Treasures Exhibition in Venice. 2017 / Getty Images
This year, Elena Geuna is working on an exhibition at the Mucem Museum in Marseille, Pino provided her with works by Jeff Koons from his collection, which, as conceived by the curator, enter into dialogue with objects, photographs and artifacts from the museum’s collection.
“Treasures from the Sunken Ship Incredible is, according to Elena Jeune, a story of hope. If Beatrice is waiting for Dante’s hero at the end of the journey, then the exhibition visitors are true. Dante determined in advance some of his contemporaries to hell, Hirst went further, he wrote them down in history. Like Doctor Who, from a series that has probably been watched by the entire population of Great Britain, he rewrote this story. “Hirst reinvented the past to predict the future. Like all great creators, he foresees what we have yet to imagine. “Treasures” tell the story of a find in the depths of the ocean (the scale of both the find and the organized search expedition, this plot is not inferior to “Titanic” by James Cameron. – Forbes Life), bring to light the past, which was considered lost, giving it previously unseen meanings “, – says Elena Jeuna.
According to the curator of Treasures, Hirst had this idea for a long time: “He began creating new works shortly after Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, a Sotheby’s auction in London (2008) of historical importance. For the first time, Damien and I discussed the idea of ”Treasure” with François Pinault almost 10 years before the exhibition. I knew that Damien was working on new sculptures, and we invited Pino to visit the studio. As you can imagine, there cannot be a more suitable place for ancient treasures to rise from under the water than Venice. ”
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What can three collectors together?
Among the exhibits in Palazzo Grassi was a bust of a collector half overgrown with algae, whose shaved head, raised chin, gaze directed into the distance, of course, immediately evoked an association with the Roman emperor from the Augustan dynasty, and at the same time this bust was strikingly similar to Hirst himself. The similarity became more noticeable as the viewers remembered that all the exhibits of the exhibition, according to legend, were part of the collection of the collector Sif Amotan II (anagram for I am fiction / I am not real).
The viewer of the 2017 exhibition looked at the works, to which three collectors had a hand. This is Hirst, who owns the Murderme collection with gallery space on Newport Street in London. This is François Pinault, the philanthropist who allowed Hirst to bring the idea to life. And Sif Amotan is a product of the artist’s imagination.
“The Treasures from the Incredible exhibition was outstanding in scope. It has developed over 5000 sq. m of museum space and was the first time that Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana were dedicated to one artist. The organization of the exhibition required the site of two museums for almost four months, and about 30 foreign companies and workshops took part in the production of the works. The preparation process was long and difficult, but the monumental Demon with Bowl in the lobby of Palazzo Grassi will be remembered forever. The plot is taken from a small painting by William Blake from the Tate collection, and although it looks like a sculpture of bronze, it is actually made of rubber. At the heart of Treasures is a mystery where the truth lies, ”says Elena Dzheuna.
Ariel’s song from Shakespeare’s Tempest could only come true in Venice, a city sinking under the water, whose Cathedral of St. Mark is also the subject of numerous borrowings. The exhibition spaces themselves, Punta della Dogana and Palazzo Grassi, are a mixture of merchants and aristocracy. Elena Dzheuna says that her task as a curator was to build a dialogue between exhibits and between exhibition spaces. “The artist and I tried to take into account the quality of both spaces,” says Jeuna. “Punta della Dogana, with its spirit of history, architecture with longitudinal naves, was perfect for an exhibition of works from the sea, many of which are monumental in size. And Palazzo Grassi, the last of the aristocratic palaces to be built on the Grand Canal, creates a more intimate atmosphere, where “treasures” were presented.
In 2017, Hirst staked out a place in the pantheon of contemporary artists and outlined a work plan. In 2021, he decided to fulfill this plan. In Venice, he wrote a modern history of art, which was to be completed. This year, he made her go through fire, water and copper pipes figuratively and literally. Now we know for sure that Hirst’s works will pass the test of all the elements and deserve a place in history, in the eternal city of Rome, among Titian, Bernini and Caravaggio. Everyone involved in this project, Elena Geuna, Francois Pinault, Damien Hirst, continued this year from where they left off in 2017, with the same persistence and the same ambition, without seeing obstacles.
