Lactulose
Lactulose
Signed Print
Damien Hirst
£10,500-£15,000
$22,000-$30,000 Value Indicator
$19,000-$28,000 Value Indicator
¥100,000-¥150,000 Value Indicator
€12,000-€17,000 Value Indicator
$110,000-$160,000 Value Indicator
¥2,090,000-¥2,980,000 Value Indicator
$14,000-$20,000 Value Indicator
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68 x 76cm, Edition of 55, Woodcut
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Meaning & Analysis
Lactulose is a 2017 woodcut by British artist, Damien Hirst, that constitutes part of the Spots collection. The 42 spots of several different colours are arranged in a six by seven grid atop an off-white background. The work is signed in the bottom right corner.
The use of spots in Hirst's oeuvre began with the painting of spots in 1986 and developed into a cogent series. Lactulose was named after the drug of the same name. It fits thematically within his Spots collection as numerous other titles, such as Methylamine, Methyl Aspartic Acid, Fenbufen, and several others are also named after chemical compounds many of which are the active component in drugs. Similarly, over 1,400 works, produced on canvas explore this theme.
The work depicts spots in ranging in colour from yellow to blue to brown. It was printed on Somerset wove paper and published by Paragon Press, London. Lactulose fits into a particular group of the Spots collection: those that are arranged in a regular grid pattern, commonly on a white or off-white background. However, Hirst has also experimented using different backgrounds, such as in Silver Spot Landscape, and different compositions, such as in his digital print from 2000, entitled Valium, where the spots are placed in a circular composition.