SEOUL.- Gagosian announced its participation in Frieze Seoul with a selection of paintings and sculptures by Damien Hirst, drawn from many of the artist’s most acclaimed series. The presentation follows Hirst’s celebrated exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, his first museum retrospective in Asia, which attracted more than half a million visitors.
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Over the past four decades, Hirst has probed the boundaries of art and life, confronting the forces that shape human experience through a range of forms, materials, and strategies. The ultimate provocateur, he has turned to both the shocking and the seemingly banal to explore the intersections and complexities of beauty, belief, and truth. The works on view at Frieze illuminate the extraordinary scope of Hirst’s oeuvre, revealing a practice that remains as vital and urgent as ever in its engagement with fundamental questions surrounding order and chaos, life and death, fiction and reality.
“It is interesting how Korea, with its distinct culture, has embraced my work” Hirst observes. “In the 1990s, people in the UK would recognize me and say, ‘Your work changed my life’ and I’m hearing the same in Korea today. It's surprising but gratifying.”
Featured in the presentation are a range of the artist’s paintings, including from two of Hirst’s most instantly recognizable series, the deliciously colored Spot Paintings and Spin Paintings, which exemplify the tension between the systematic and the unpredictable that runs throughout his work. In the Spot Paintings, meticulously handmade compositions take on the precision and uniformity of the mechanically produced, while in the Spin Paintings, a motorized apparatus produces works shaped by chance and unpredictability.
Imitation Gold (2016), from the Colour Space series, builds on these earlier approaches, combining formal rigor with spontaneity to create a distinctive visual language of organically positioned elements in which no hue is repeated. Garden of Fun and Games (2023), from The Secret Gardens Paintings series, presents a vibrant floral display overlaid with splatters of paint, celebrating both the precision and the randomness of nature. Illustrating the full breadth of Hirst’s painterly practice, The Shot Crow (2009), a triptych from the Blue Paintings, represents his embrace of figurative imagery in the late 2000s, which also marked a significant return to the canvas for the artist after a several year hiatus.
Among the seminal works on view are the closely related Nemesis (2007), a medicine cabinet sculpture, and Twenty One Pills (2008), a canvas from the Fact Paintings series. These works exemplify Hirst’s long-standing artistic investigations into the collision of pharmaceuticals and faith in the modern era. In both works, Hirst mines the human obsession with prolonging life, examining how belief in science has come to replace religion in much of contemporary society.
The Severed Head of Medusa (2008) and Daisy (2019) are drawn from Hirst’s ambitious world-building series Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, in which his sculptures are presented as relics recovered from a fictional shipwreck. The elaborate narrative constructed around these works ultimately connects to concerns that have preoccupied the artist since the earliest days of his career and appear throughout his oeuvre: truth versus myth, faith versus fact, and the place of science in art.
