Damien Hirst presents the third installment of his year-long partnership at the Gagosian London’s Brittania Street location. In his latest exhibition, titled “Emergency Paintings, Danger Paintings, Hazard Pictures, and Seizures,” the acclaimed British artist has created a series of work related to the visual experiences of warning, danger, crime, rescue, and death.
The show follows two earlier installments — Fact Paintings and Fact Sculptures, which were exhibited in April, along with Relics and Fly Paintings, which just recently concluded in September. Hirst was inspired to make his Emergency Paintings through observing the many warning graphics he’d see on long car journeys. The artist took quick photographs of his sightings and reinterpreted them in a similar hard-edge pastiche that can be traced to the likes of Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella.
Additionally, Hirst extends the idea of danger from the surfaces of urban signage to the physical skins of animals — such as poisonous frogs, insects, snakes, and sea creatures. The artist notes that the collection of work references “a thing that nature does that’s similar to what we do on emergency vehicles. We stole the idea from nature, of course, and hid it in geometry.”
Similar to his Pill Cabinets Series, Seizures continues on Hirst’s fascination with systems of taxonomy — this time focusing on police confiscating large quantities of illegal drugs in a display of triumph. “Emergency Paintings, Danger Paintings, Hazard Pictures, and Seizures” is on view at Gagosian’s Brittania Street location.
Elsewhere, Umar Rashid paints the fictitious history of the Frenglish Empire.
Gagosian
6–24 Britannia Street
London wc1x 9jd
