★☆☆☆☆
Do you have sitting in your hall a pile of lockdown clear-out bags? Have you been waiting for charity shops to reopen this week? Damien Hirst’s Fact Paintings and Fact Sculptures at the Gagosian gallery has that feel. Junk, jumble, regifted presents.
The 41 works on display were created between 1993 and 2021. Hirst has been granted a year-long “takeover” of the Gagosian and he is here as both artist and curator. Stick to the day job, Damien. It’s an incoherent, ill-arranged hang. The works don’t talk to each other, they skirmish and scowl.
What is Hirst’s day job? Artist? Stunt co-ordinator? Factory foreman? (Churn ’em out, sell ’em expensive.) I’m not the first to liken Hirst to PT Barnum, the New York impresario who knew how to put on a show. That was certainly true of Hirst’s city-wide installation Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable in Venice in 2017. Here he’s just a troll.
Barnum is supposed to have said of his punters: “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Sucker is putting it nicely. The opening room at the Gagosian contains vitrines with titles including F***ing Entitled C***, Deluded Rich Wanker, Upper Class Twat, Public School Tosser and that most loaded of four-letter words Snob. There’s a mixed-media bin bag called Idiot. Each glass cabinet is done up like a jeweller’s display case with earrings in boxes and disembodied necks modelling ropes of pearls and diamond chokers. Pearls before swine? Diamonds in the dust heap? The cabinets have mirrored backs. It takes some gumption and no little contempt to give your works such disobliging titles then show the viewer/buyer their own reflection. Hirst has always been a Hatton Gardens wide boy; swears it’s sapphire, sells you paste.
“Throughout his storied career”, says the gallery flapdoodle, “Hirst has confronted the systems of belief that define human existence, from common trust in medicine to the seduction of consumerism. At a moment when the idea of ‘truth’ has never been more tenuous, Hirst’s Fact Paintings and Sculptures question the obduracy of ‘fact’ as a governing principle of society.” Fake news, fake art.
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Hirst’s fact paintings reproduce photographs pixel-for-pixel in oil on canvas. It’s a nice conceit, but the effect is that of an inkjet printer: true to life, only blurrier, duller. The butterfly pictures (butterflies are a Hirst motif) are no better than the art you get on ceilings over dentists’ chairs. Something soothing to look at as the drill goes in.
You could make the case that Hirst’s medicine cabinets, first made in the Noughties, have a new post-pandemic resonance. All that TCP and PPE. You could say that his steel shelves stacked with Persil products say something about stockpiling, supply chains and our dependence on the supermarket model. You could say that Andy Warhol did it long before and better. There’s a work called Coke/Diet Coke Vending Machine. I asked the guard if it was real. He said yes. I put in a pound and collected my Coke. Hirst is £1 up and I am £1 down. See what I mean about suckers?
Gagosian, 6-24 Britannia Street, London WC1; 020 7841 9960
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