The many paintings of the birth of Hirst’s third child by Caesarean section are badly copied from photographs, yet they cannot help being poignant. The highlights look as if they were done in Tippex, the reflections of hospital equipment, of bloody bowls and surgical knifes, are generally misplaced, yet the expressions of anxiety, concentration and eventual joy are more affecting for being inept. And which father will not recognize the self-deprecating wit of captioning his own photograph, masked and gowned, Self-Portrait as Surgeon?
But the piece that convinced me that Hirst was sincere was in some ways the silliest in the show. Three skinned sheep kneel in prayer before a whole neonatal unit containing incubator, heart monitor, miniature dummy and bottle and all the paraphernalia familiar to any new parent who has spent anguished days in intensive care. It is a nativity scene, obviously, and the baby is cast in pure silver. Or, rather, its skeleton is silver, for the body has spirited away. All that’s left is a bright vision, a transfiguration — or a terrible fear: nothing but precious bones.
At the last count, Hirst was just below Jeff Koons in the 100 most important figures in the art world, though they will surely reverse positions some day soon. Koons, famously an early influence on Hirst, is more than 10 years older and his two new London shows suggest that he’s running out of puff.
Or just going backwards. Giant swimming-pool inflatables of spotty dogs and lobsters are cast in aluminium, but painted to look exactly like plastic, a nugatory advance on the heavy-metal balloons of the 1980s. And Koons’ huge new series of paintings, the size of billboards and fully as brash, go right back to the sampling and layering of that decade.
Monkey-faced balloons, steam trains, Popeye, the Incredible Hulk, the Liberty Bell, all are overlaid in eye-popping lime, turquoise, violet and yellow. Styles are scrambled — woodcut, cartoon, photorealism, oilpaint squeezed out like toothpaste, but each portrayed with flawlessly invisible brushwork. Silver overprints turn white or vanish in certain lights, so that you notice only this Jolly Green Giant or that lurking leafprint from unexpected angles in the gallery. They should keep the eye in constant motion — no place to rest — but in fact, they resist even the most dutiful contemplation.
Illusion, confusion, collage, pastiche: the canvases reminded me a little of Sigmar Polke’s tricksy games of the Eighties but without the intellectual thrust. Like the sculptures, these Popish paintings are monumental but typically, deliberately, weightless.
RSS