Damien Hirst: Reverence, Revelation, Devotion

Reverence, Revelation, Devotion is a new large-format hardback publication showcasing the complete works from three new series of paintings by Damien Hirst: the ‘Reverence Paintings’, ‘The Revelations’, and ‘The Devotions’. Planning the size and scale before starting to paint, Hirst worked on several paintings at once, applying layers to the canvases simultaneously.  The result is a series of gestural, abstract paintings produced through intuition and impulsiveness. Just as Jackson Pollock said, ‘I am nature’, Hirst sets about to ‘use the nature in me,’ tapping into artistic expression and innate wildness.

The paintings in each series are both mechanical and naturalistic, by which Hirst explores the possibility of ‘a person trying to paint like a machine’. Beautifully designed and featuring almost 200 full-colour reproductions of the 144 artworks, in both their entirety and their detail, the book is published with an essay by British writer and critic Jonathan Griffin, in which he compares these series to the work of Agnes Martin, Louise Bourgeois and Robert Ryman.