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Image: The Last Supper. Artist: Damien Hirst. |
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Drawings, Prints, Multiples |
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Damien Hirst: The Last Supper |
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The Last Supper is a suite of 13 screenprints, each measuring 152.5 x 101.5cms in an edition of 150. Each print is framed in a heavy white seamless laser cut factory produced Formica frame, austere and beautiful in their sterile perfection. The prints mimick the graphic design of medicinal industry packaging, using colours reminiscent of Hirst’s ongoing Spot Painting series, inspired by commercial drug firm product catalogues.
In addition to the product number and dosage information, each typographically individual print has the drug name substituted for pedestrian British foods such as Beans, Chips and Cornish Pasty – initially perhaps creating associations with the artist himself and his forays into restaurant ownership, though it is doubtful that such foods would ever be served in Pharmacy.
The biographical theme is furthered through the familiar company trademarks being replaced with the artist’s own name or a stylised D+H logo – corporate and authoritative. This simple alteration immediately raises questions about the nature of belief in large corporations and to a degree, the blind faith inherent in contemporary society for pharmaceutical drugs to ease our pain and heal the body.
Parallels to the faith and commitment evident in religious belief are simply evoked through the appropriation of the conceptual structure of the Last Supper. 13 images representing the 13 participants at the meal, the title itself suggesting nutrition for the body and the spirit, coupled with decay and ultimately death – the ongoing theme of Hirst’s work.
Upon initial viewing, the prints appears cold, contained, unforgiving. The drugs selected for reproduction are mainly used to treat cardiac trauma, AIDS and serious terminal conditions. The bleak subject matter is tempered by the candy colours and dark humour of the prints, although this particular eye candy is deceptive: 'I had my stomach pumped as a child because I ate pills thinking they were sweets.'
The title could be seen to refer to the last meal of a dying individual consisting of a chemical, though the alteration of the drug to a basic food makes this reading doubtful. The lack of figurative representation or religious iconography also makes the religious titling seem tenuous. However, Hirst’s work often features metaphoric elements, which allude to surrogate human forms. This context cannot be overlooked: 'I like metaphor; people need to feel distanced.'
Here, the 13 prints form iconoclastic portraits of Christ and the twelve disciples through the pop art visual device of generic mass production and the commercial world.
In the Gospel of Saint Matthew, Jesus referred to himself as a physician and was repeatedly written about by theologians as the greatest of all doctors and apothecaries. Saint Augustine wrote that meditation on Christ’s life is the antidote for the sin of pride that caused the fall of man and the joy that results from such contemplation is the cure for melancholy. Interestingly, the second patron of physicians, Saint Damian, is also renown for his miraculous healing. Damien the artist, perhaps aware of this connection, asserts a conceptual link between medicine and art: 'Art is like medicine – it can heal. Yet I’ve always been amazed at how many people believe in medicine but don’t believe in art, without questioning either.'
Hirst also alludes to the beneficial effects described through the meditation on Christ’s life when discussing the emotional chemistry of colour: 'If you’re happy, you paint a happy yellow-and-red painting; if you’re depressed you paint a sombre brown and purple painting; or… share your good feelings with your friends, or… take anti-depressants… I believe painting and all art should be ultimately uplifting for the viewer. I love colour. I feel it inside me. It gives me a buzz.'
Hirst plays out the metaphor of colour as drug and religious experience in the rich hues of The Last Supper screenprints. As artist-doctor-priest he prescribes mood affecting colour meditation in the guise of controlled substances. If art can heal, does Hirst also believe that like food, it can nourish and sustain?
Metaphorically, ingested food and medicine parallel images that are visually and mentally absorbed by the viewer. In each case something that is external becomes part of us. The concept of internalisation could be read as a functional but not necessarily spiritual metaphorical allusion to the biblical account of the Last Supper, at which the sacrament of Holy Communion was instituted when Christ administered his body and blood to the disciples in the form of consecrated bread and wine. According to Christian doctrine, all become one with the Saviour and achieve eternal spiritual life through the liturgical re-enactment of the rites established at the Last Supper. Within this interpretative context, art is internalised and becomes a source of metaphysical nourishment. Hirst poses questions about sustenance, growth, life and death within the parameters of religious precepts without necessarily subscribing to religious belief: 'So you have no religious beliefs at all?' 'Probably not.'
Instead, Hirst utilises a recognisable social structure – religious belief, in order to guide the viewer in reading the concerns addressed within The Last Supper. Hirst believes art has the power to renew, sustain and even heal the human psyche, and perhaps the human spirit too, and confesses to an 'obsession with trying to make the dead live or the living live forever.' His work takes an iconoclastic approach to conventional visual modes by adopting surrogate forms for the human body. However, he is not in favour of complete abandonment of the image itself in his portrayal of the human condition.
Hirst resolutely identifies himself as a visual rather than conceptual artist: 'I think that individuality is a confusing thing, so to get rid of that visually is exciting.' Hirst’s deceptively simple approach to his art masks the big questions about life, love, death and mortality. As such, he is a very traditional artist working within very contemporary frames of reference.' Colin Ledwith, 2001
All quotations taken from 'I want to spend the rest of my life with everyone, one to one, always, forever, now' 1997 Booth-Clibborn editions.
Born in 1965 in Bristol, Hirst grew up in Leeds and came to prominence while still a student at Goldsmiths College when he masterminded the highly acclaimed group show Freeze (1988) and then Gambler (1990) and Modern Medicine (1990). His work has been included in many group exhibitions, among them Young British Artists (Saatchi Gallery, 1992), Sensation (Royal Academy of Arts, 1997), as well as solo exhibitions, most recently Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results and Findings at the Gagosian Gallery, New York (2000). Hirst won the Turner Prize in 1995.
Exhibition tour dates:
International Centre of Graphic Arts, Tivoli Castle, Ljubljana, Slovenia: 11 June – 28 September 2001
The Last Supper prints now form part of the British Council Collection, for all to see.
For further information please contact Colin Ledwith: colin.ledwith@britishcouncil.org |
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