Name: Esculetin
Brand: Damien Hirst
Rating: 4.9 (183 reviews)

Meaning & Analysis

Signed in the bottom right hand corner Damien Hirst’s Esculetin depicts twenty circles of colour placed in a grid on a white backdrop. The woodcut print is part of Hirst’s Spots collection: a collection which Hirst has addressed and added to throughout the years in several different ways.

read more about 40 Woodcut Spots

Esculetin is just one of a vast number of works in which Hirst has explored the motif of depicting spots, with over 1,400 works on canvas that explore this theme. In this work there are twenty spots arranged in a regular order. They vary in colours including royal blue, light blue, various different hues of pink and yellow, brown, and two different hues of green. The colours were producing by woodcutting and printing on 410 GSM Somerset White Paper.

The work may be compared to other prints from the Spots collection that Hirst produced in the late 2000s and early 2010s. For instance, his 3-Methylthymidine print of 2015 also depicts twenty spots. The works differ as Esculetin is arranged in a portrait orientation and the colours are perhaps more vivid.

Esculetin’s contribution to the Spots series may be seen as symptomatic of Hirst’s approach to the production of art. He has previously stated that he likes “to do series”. Even the title of the work, named after a chemical compound, contributes to a series of titles that are named after other chemicals. This contributes to the fame of the Spots series and the works within it instantly being attributed to Hirst.