Meaning & Analysis

Cesium Sulfate is a woodcut print from Damien Hirst’s 40 Woodcut Spots series from 2011. The print shows a large green circle on the left of the composition and a red semi-circle of the same size at the right-hand edge of the print. This print appears like a drastically cropped version of Hirst’s more typical spot paintings in only depicting one and a half spots.

read more about 40 Woodcut Spots

As with all of the spot paintings that Hirst has produced in his career, this print is formulaic and crisp in form. The spots are a perfect circle and semi-circle set against a clinical white backdrop. Their clean edges and bright, flat colours indicate a lack of human touch in the production of this print. Hirst in fact employed assistants to produce them and the paintings are painstaking and laborious to produce.

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.”