Why is the Colour Space collection important?

The Spot paintings were compelling due to their potential towards endlessness, but the Colour Space paintings and this collection of prints mark a turn in Hirst’s attitude towards his work because they are a finite set of works. As Hirst explains, 'My first ever Spot painting was loose and painted with drippy paint and not minimal at all. In that painting, I was wrestling with what I originally thought of as the coldness of Minimalism and the more emotional Abstract Expressionist painting style I’d grown up with. At the time I painted it, it felt uncool and I abandoned it immediately for the rigidity of the grid, removing the mess, but after doing the Spot catalogue raisonné I’ve felt really drawn to that first painting and knew I’d revisit it eventually.'

How do I buy a Colour Space print?

One of the easiest and most cost-effective ways of buying work by Damien Hirst is by using us to reach a seller. MyArtBroker is a curated site, meaning we feature artists that our collectors say they want. You can find Damien Hirst art for sale here. You’ll need to create a free account to buy or sell with us.

How can I sell my Colour Space print?

If you're looking to sell art by Damien Hirst, click the link and we can help. We employ a number of techniques and practices in order to give a realistic and achievable valuation on any art listed on myartbroker.com. We analyse the demand for the work in question, take into consideration previous sales and auction valuations, we assess the current gallery valuation and monitor the current deals taking place via MyArtBroker every day. We regularly advise sellers on a price bracket for their artwork completely free of charge.

H5 Colour Space by Damien Hirst Background & Meaning

H5
Colour Space

In Colour Space (2018) prints, Damien Hirst’s iconic spot motif breaks free from his usual composition of an orderly grid. The prints’ freehand composition creates a Pollock-esque riot of colour and mishap that showcases, in Hirst’s words, ‘the fallibility of the human hand in the drips and inconsistencies.’

Meaning & Analysis

Produced in 2018 as a set of 8 prints, Damien Hirst’s H5 Colour Space series demonstrates the artist’s ongoing negotiation with coloured dots. Playing into an artistic focus that has been a constant throughout his career, ever since his famous Spots, Hirst’s Colour Space paintings, which these prints are based on, were first exhibited at the Gagosian Gallery in New York in 2018.

The Colour Space collection presents a variation on Hirst’s spot paintings but exudes a more human and painterly aesthetic. Rather than depicting clinical and perfectly painted circles, the prints in this series show hundreds of dots spontaneously dancing across the composition, sometimes overlapping, and coinciding with the occasional paint splatter. The impulsive quality of this series resembles Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionist works and is far more expressive than Hirst’s earlier works depicting spots and dots.

Despite abandoning the grid formulation of his earlier works, this very recent collection of Hirst prints does still adhere to the basic rules of artist’s spot paintings. He recalled, 'I originally wanted the Spots to look like they were painted by a human trying to paint like a machine. Colour Space is going back to the human element, so instead you have the fallibility of the human hand in the drips and inconsistencies. There are still no two exact colours that repeat in each painting, which is really important to me. I think of them as cells under a microscope.'

The Spot paintings were compelling due to their potential towards endlessness, but the Colour Space paintings and this collection of prints mark a turn in Hirst’s attitude towards his work because they are a finite set of works. As Hirst explains, 'My first ever Spot painting was loose and painted with drippy paint and not minimal at all. In that painting, I was wrestling with what I originally thought of as the coldness of Minimalism and the more emotional Abstract Expressionist painting style I’d grown up with. At the time I painted it, it felt uncool and I abandoned it immediately for the rigidity of the grid, removing the mess, but after doing the Spot catalogue raisonné I’ve felt really drawn to that first painting and knew I’d revisit it eventually.'
It is only in the later stages of Hirst’s career that he has become interested in prints and editions. His first print portfolio was produced in 1999 and were a set of screen prints that depicted medicine bottle labels. Since his first print portfolio, Hirst has ventured into the technique of etching like the prints in the Colour Space series.
If you're looking to sell art by Damien Hirst, click the link and we can help. We employ a number of techniques and practices in order to give a realistic and achievable valuation on any art listed on myartbroker.com. We analyse the demand for the work in question, take into consideration previous sales and auction valuations, we assess the current gallery valuation and monitor the current deals taking place via MyArtBroker every day. We regularly advise sellers on a price bracket for their artwork completely free of charge.