Damien Hirst: Two Weeks One Summer

This publication accompanies the Damien Hirst ‘Two Weeks One Summer’ exhibition at White Cube Gallery, May 2012. Painting has always been an important part of Hirst’s oeuvre, but unlike the spot paintings and photorealist series which were made using a collaborative studio process, this body of work is altogether more personal: painted from life, by Hirst in his Devon studio.The paintings, often intimate in size, could be seen as traditional still lifes, depicting an array of carefully arranged elements, both natural and inanimate, sometimes memento mori, alongside objects and formal devices that have made their appearance in Hirst’s sculptures and installations before. Exquisitely coloured birds on display stands or in simple glass boxes, butterflies, fruit and cherry blossom at the peak of its beauty, intimate the pure joy of spring’s transition into summer but also the temporal significance of this natural phenomenon.Next to these bucolic objects, more sinister symbols take their place: oversized scissors, a shark’s gaping jawbone, bell jars and even several lonely single or conjoined foetuses floating in jars, elements that are displaced from the laboratory table rather than the domestic one. Some objects are painted with clarity and impasto; others appear hazy and faint, as if they are somehow more insubstantial, part of a sudden apparition or dream-like vision.