Beverley Hills – H5-2

Damien Hirst’s argument that ‘colour is just a powerful, uplifting thing’ is materialises is ‘Beverley Hills’ (2018). This facsimile print from the ‘Colour Space’ series of paintings from 2016 portrays a free-flowing approach to depicting spots, diverging from his iconic ‘Spots’ works while maintaining its focus of the optical effects of colour relations.

There is a distinct sense of movement in ‘Beverley Hills’ as spots not only touch and overlap, but some appear to shoot into place almost like comets. These variously coloured spots are imperfectly rendered, their shapes warped in a deliberate attempt to defy Hirst’s once formal precision. Some colours even splatter, pulling paint across the work and rendering these spots like floating balloons. Joined with their distinctly vibrant colours, ‘Beverley Hills’ is an entirely joyful piece.

The seemingly endless spots which cover and exceed the picture plane are also akin to atoms. Reverberating with a dynamic amount of life and energy, these spots bounce around, together fortuitously forming a composition that continues to change before the viewer. The longer one stands before ‘Beverley Hills’, the more swirling and circular patterns that emerge, an effect that is maintained in the present high-quality diasec-mounted giclée print on aluminium panel.