Name: Quinaldic Acid
Brand: Damien Hirst
Rating: 4.9 (225 reviews)

Track auction value trend

The value of Damien Hirst’s Quinaldic Acid (signed) is estimated to be worth between £6,000 and £9,000. This woodcut print, created in 2010, has shown consistent value growth, with an average annual growth rate of 20%. This is a rare artwork with an auction history of three total sales since its entry to the market on 13th September 2017. The hammer price over the past five years has ranged from £6,309 in October 2018 to £7,183 in November 2022. The edition size of this work is limited to 24.

Auction Date

Auction House

Artwork

Hammer Price

Return to Seller

Buyer Paid

September 2022

Phillips London - United Kingdom

Quinaldic Acid - Signed Print

December 2017

Christie's New York - United States

Quinaldic Acid - Signed Print

September 2017

Sotheby's Online - United Kingdom

Quinaldic Acid - Signed Print

Meaning & Analysis

Taken from Damien Hirst’s vast 12 Woodcut Spots series, Quinaldic Acid is a woodcut print from 2010. The print shows a perfect circle in red, positioned in the centre of the square composition. Set against a plain white backdrop, this print appears like a drastically cropped version of one of Hirst’s more recognisable spot paintings. As a result, Quinaldic Acid is decidedly abstract.

This print is highly simplistic and immediate in its effect on the viewer, unambiguous in its depiction of a large spot with bright and flattened colour. Due to its smooth surface and obvious composition, this print deceptively removes any sense of human labour or touch. In the 1980s, the spot paintings marked a shift in Hirst’s artistic career, where he began to employ assistants to complete the painstaking and laborious task of producing these works. The apparent lack of human intervention in these works further emphasises the mathematical precision that underlines their compositions.

Fascinated by intuitive colour choice from his days at Goldsmiths, Hirst claims that the spot paintings have removed any problems he previously had with colour, allowing him to present a perfect arrangement of colour that is never repeated. Hirst explains that, “mathematically, with the spot paintings, I probably discovered the most fundamentally important thing in any kind of art. Which is the harmony of where colour can exist on its own, interacting with other colours in a perfect format.”