Picolinic Acid
Picolinic Acid
Signed Print
Damien Hirst
Woodcut, 2011
Signed Print Edition of 55
H 20cm x W 51cm
Critical Review
Picolinic Acid is a woodcut print from Damien Hirst’s 40 Woodcut Spots series from 2011. The print shows a large red spot on the left of the composition and a turquoise 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.
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.
The formulaic compositions of the 40 Woodcut Spots series explore the boundaries between aesthetics and science and are based in Hirst’s fascination with colour combinations and harmony. The series embodies Hirst’s artistic oeuvre that interrogates the intersections between the scientific and the artistic that are wrongly assumed to be oppositional in contemporary culture.
