Private Viewing of Monet & Architecture at the National Gallery
Visits the latest show at Houghton Hall in Norfolk and finds it buzzing with energy
Damien Hirst’s career can be viewed as a series of disasters, each bringing greater success than the last. In 2009, for instance, the man who, 18 years previously, had turned art on its head by exhibiting a shark in formaldehyde, decided to switch to figurative painting, with a series of Francis Bacon-inspired skull canvases that were universally panned and widely seen as presaging the end of his career. Yet every painting sold.
Then, last year, he filled two Venetian palaces with faux-classical objects supposedly salvaged from an ancient Greek shipwreck: a vanity project so lame it actually made me feel sorry for the world’s richest artist. But again, everything sold, at handsome prices, with no visible lasting damage to the Hirst brand.
So when you hear that the great trickster has again returned to painting, reprising his Spot Paintings of the Nineties amid the baroque splendour of Houghton Hall – country retreat of Britain’s de facto first prime minister, Robert Walpole – you have to assume that the resulting exhibition, however dire, will be first and foremost another stunt: a staging post on a trajectory that has kept the king of the YBAs very much in the public eye, even if he is no longer relevant to the cutting edge of contemporary art.
What you find here will certainly surprise you, but not quite in the way that you expect. The first sign that something’s amiss in Houghton’s Arcadian landscape is a great lump of gruesomely garish plastic-looking stuff dumped by the drive: a flesh-coloured cuboid form, 5ft high, with black spikes protruding from the top, and yellow and purple lumps bulging from the sides. It’s a blown-up cross-section of a fragment of human skin, complete with veins, gobbets of fat and hair follicles. Despite the impression of skin-crawling cheap-and-nastiness, it’s rendered – typically for Hirst – in expensive painted bronze.
Other colossal bronzes inspired by anatomical textbooks loom over Houghton’s lawns: sections of flesh cut away to reveal bloody sinew, skulls and, in the case of Virgin Mother, an unborn foetus. If the sense of scientific inquiry complements the rational classicism of the house, painting these figures in eye-popping shades of industrial enamel gives them a look of fierce primitivism that jars with the humane order of their surroundings.
So far, pretty much exactly what you’d expect from a Damien Hirst exhibition at a stately home, then, but the feel changes dramatically as you move inside.
Hirst’s Spot Paintings of the early Nineties – comprising rows of randomly selected coloured dots on clinical white grounds – impressed at the time, both in their chutzpah (they were entirely produced by assistants) and with a touch of something sinister in their medicinal blankness.
The Colour Space paintings at Houghton, however, hark back to the very first of the Spot Paintings, created by Hirst himself, in which the dots were more roughly and expressively rendered, and overlapped, so that they created a sense of recession in space. In the current works, all painted over the past two years, and again entirely by assistants, the dots seem to swarm over the surface, creating a pulsing, organic energy.
Rather than simply plonking these works provocatively through baroque designer William Kent’s sumptuous state rooms, curator Mario Codognato, who conceived the idea of bringing these paintings to Houghton, has attempted to integrate them with this unlikely setting, matching the scale of the canvases and the spots themselves with Houghton’s geometric panelling and luxuriant materials. If that sounds a thankless task, the paintings often fall beautifully into place, as though designed for these very rooms.
The narrative implicit in the contrast of the rigid classical order of the paintings and the buzzing molecular energy of the art is a relatively slight one. But as a style statement, the meeting of Sixties Op Art-flavoured paintings and refined country house baroque couldn’t work better.
Hirst can’t resist throwing in the odd macabre joke, such as a skull with ping-pong ball eye floating on currents of air, but ultimately it’s the sense of effortless English good taste that is the most disconcerting element in this whole intriguing enterprise.