Damien Hirst, Colour Chart (glitter), 2017

Screenprint with glitter on UV printed brushed aluminum panel

35.5 x 73.75 in | 90 x 187.5 cm

Beautifully shimmering, ‘Colour Chart (Glitter)’ (H3) was published in 2017 as part of Damien Hirst’s ‘Colour Charts’ painting series. A milestone in Hirst’s quest to capture the joy of colour in his work, ‘Colour Chart (Glitter)’ fuses the commercial and mass-produced nature of colour charts found in home improvement stores with the endeavours of his iconic ‘Spot Paintings’ series (begun in 1986).

‘Colour Chart (Glitter)’ was born out of the fundamental logic of Hirst’s ‘Spot Paintings’. Here enlarging and flattening the spots into rectangles, colour is never repeated and is organised into perfectly shaped and equally sized forms into a grid. Notably different from ‘Spot Paintings’, the once blank backgrounds are interrupted by name tags, numbered codes and company logos, which emphatically individualise each colour. Further, 12 coloured rectangles are set within a black box in the right field of the canvas, emphasising different colour contrasts.

Hirst recreates the consumer’s experience of comparing commercial paint colours, through small boxes of colour and descriptive text, putting his own spin on the format along the way. Notably, unlike commercial paint samples, the colours do not gradate but appear to be organised at random, complicating the colours and the comparative experience. In ‘Colour Chart (Glitter)’ Hirst takes this one step further, screenprinting each colour sample with glitter to add a playfulness to the composition and a humour by insinuating houses full of shimmering walls.

With ‘Colour Chart (Glitter)’ Hirst transforms ordinary, functional tools into art objects that foreground the interactive potentials of colour. Presenting as an art object what in the real world would be an unartistic, mundane detail of everyday life, Hirst forces the viewer to appreciate this fundamental element of aesthetic beauty. By returning to the multiplicious nature of printed commercial colour charts, abstracted from the paint they are made to represent, these prints allow viewers to become enthralled by the natures of the colours themselves, and lose themselves in the neat, harmonious arrangements.