Damien Hirst, Cherry Blossoms
The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain presents the show Cherry Blossoms, Damien Hirst’s new series of paintings, celebrating colour within chaos.
“The Cherry Blossoms are about beauty and life and death. They’re extreme—there’s something almost tacky about them. […] They’re decorative but taken from nature. […] They’re garish and messy and fragile and about me moving away from Minimalism and the idea of an imaginary mechanical painter and that’s so exciting for me.” – Damien Hirst
The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain presents the exhibition Cherry Blossoms, Damien Hirst’s remarkable new series of paintings. Cherry Blossoms is Damien Hirst’s first museum exhibition in France. A show that is nothing less than a celebration of colour within chaos.
The Cherry Blossoms series reinterprets, with playful irony, the traditional subject of landscape painting. Hirst combines thick brushstrokes and elements of gestural painting, referencing both Impressionism and Pointillism, as well as Action Painting. The monumental canvases, which are entirely covered in dense bright colours, envelope the viewer in a vast floral landscape moving between figuration and abstraction.
The Cherry Blossoms are at once a subversion and homage to the great artistic movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They are integral to the pictorial exploration long carried out by Hirst.
In his London studio, the artist describes “diving into the paintings and completely blitzing them from one end to the other.” He also talks about working on several canvases at the same time and constantly returning to these, which he kept close by, months after their completion.
After devoting three full years to the series, Damien Hirst finished the Cherry Blossoms series in November 2020: “[The pandemic] has given me a lot more time to live with the paintings, and look at them, and make absolutely certain that everything’s finished.” The complete series comprises 107 canvases (all reproduced in the exhibition catalog), divided into single panels, diptychs, triptychs, quadriptychs, and even a hexaptych, all large-format.
Damien Hirst, Cherry Blossoms is on show at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain from July 6, 2021 to January 2, 2022.
View of the exhibition, Damien Hirst, Cherry Blossoms, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris Photos : Thibaut Voisin
Articles you also might like
The 29th edition of miart, Milan’s modern & contemporary art fair organized by Fiera Milano, returns this year with 179 galleries and a series of special exhibitions and events onsite and across the city. miart takes places between April 4th-6th.
The Fondazione Officine Saffi presents a solo exhibition of works by Norwegian artist Ann Beate Tempelhaug titled, I should have not used blue? The exhibition is on view through May 31, 2025.
The CID Grand Hornu presents Lucile Soufflet: Common Grounds, a solo exhibition dedicated to the Belgian designer and her specialization around street furniture. The exhibition is on view between March 16-August 24, 2025.
For her second solo exhibition with Spazio Nobile Gallery, French artist Éva Garcia presents a body of new work based on her two practices: engraving, in dialogue and resonance with sculpture, as a shared vision of the state of the world. Weight, density and texture are omnipresent in a tactility that is both visual and haptic. The strength and fragility of elements such as the human body or rock enter into tension with the eye, provoking a profound emotion that is both total and fragmented. Taille Douce, includes large-scale prints and sculptures in both the main Spazio Nobile gallery and in the Studiolo across the street. The exhibition is on view through May 18, 2025.