Following on from his success with his previous show titled Mental Escapology in the Swiss Alps, British artist Damien Hirst travels to Paris's 14th district for his new show, Cherry Blossoms in partnership with Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art.
Marking the artists first ever museum exhibition in France, a new and joyful take on landscape paintings is explored, both a celebration of colour and an exploration of Impressionism and Pointillism, a tribute to the artistic expressions reverent in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The exhibition will feature an impressive 107 canvases, curated in large format single panels, diptychs, triptychs, quadriptychs and hexaptych, making the works monumental in space and time, depicting both joy and chaos all throughout the painting.
In a recent press release for The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, the artist states, "The Cherry Blossoms are about beauty and life and death. They’re extreme—there’s something almost tacky about them. Like Jackson Pollock twisted by love. They’re decorative but taken from nature. They’re about desire and how we process the things around us and what we turn them into, but also about the insane visual transience of beauty—a tree in full crazy blossom against a clear sky. It’s been so good to make them, to be completely lost in color and in paint in my studio. 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."
A response to an invitation as presented by the General Director of the Fondation Cartier, Hervé Chandès back in London in 2019, the exhibition presents itself as the finished result of a work in progress that took the artist three full years in time. First finishing Cherry Blossoms back in November 2020, the exhibition will show 6 July, 2021 until 2 January, 2022 with more information available on fondationcartier.com.
Feature image Damien Hirst, 2019 © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2021. Picture © Prudence Cuming Associates
