‌
FairArt Logo

40 Woodcut Spots

Damien Hirst's '40 Woodcut Spots' is a 2011 Paragon Press series of 40 woodcuts on Somerset paper, each editioned at 55. Every sheet keeps the spot-painting rule of equal circles, evenly spaced and never the same colour twice, but the formats run from a single spot on a sheet about 15 cm square to grids of twenty or more on sheets 80 cm high.

All 40 Woodcut Spots Works By Damien Hirst (41)

Significance & Analysis

The series sets Hirst's most machine-like motif against one of printmaking's oldest hand processes, and then tests it at forty different scales. The spot paintings were built to look as if no hand had touched them. Here every circle had to be cut into wood, inked and pressed onto paper.

One rule, forty formats

What changes from print to print is size and count, never the system. 'Oleandrigenin' is one orange spot on a sheet barely 16 cm across, and 'Equilin' a single blue one. 'Picolinic Acid' crops the grid so hard that only one and a half circles remain on a long, narrow strip. At the other end, 'Ala-Met' sets twenty spots on a sheet 80.2 x 63.5 cm, and 'Fast Scarlet TR Base' turns the grid on its side at 64.8 x 78.7 cm. Seen together, the forty sheets read like samples cut from one endless spot painting at different points and magnifications.

Cut, not painted

Woodcut is a relief process: the areas meant to print are left standing on the block, everything else is cut away, and the raised surface is inked and pressed onto the sheet. The colour lies flat and dense on the heavy Somerset paper, with none of the faint brush marks that remain on a painted spot. The prints were published by The Paragon Press, the London publisher Charles Booth-Clibborn founded in 1986, which had already editioned Hirst's spot etchings.

At auction

'Ala-Met', the largest sheet, made $29,110 with premium at Phillips in September 2022, more than three times the $8,750 it fetched at Christie's in October 2014. The small sheets trade at a fraction of that: the single orange spot of 'Oleandrigenin' made £2,805 at Bonhams in London in the summer of 2020.

Before and after

The woodcuts followed Paragon's spot etchings of the previous decade, part of Hirst's wider run of Spots prints, which had kept the circles on paper through photography, etching and screenprint. Woodcut then became the medium Hirst kept returning to with the same publisher: single sheets such as 'Lactulose' and 'Isocytosine' in 2017, and a further set, '2018 Woodcut Spots', the following year.

Are All The Titles Names Of Drugs?

No. Some are medicines, such as nifedipine for blood pressure, fenbufen for inflammation and probucol for cholesterol, and curare began as an arrow poison. Others are dyes or laboratory reagents, including Fast Scarlet TR Base, quinizarin and glycine cresol red. Ala-Met, Ala-His and Thr-Ser are short chains of two amino acids, and 'Jojoba Bean Oil' and 'Amniotic Fluid' are not single compounds at all.

Which Are The Largest And Smallest Prints?

'Ala-Met' is the largest, at 80.2 x 63.5 cm, followed by 'Fast Scarlet TR Base' at 64.8 x 78.7 cm and 'Isovanillin' at 49.5 x 63.5 cm. The smallest are 'Ethisterone' and 'Manganese Chloride', each 12.7 cm square. Most fall between, with a large group of 30.5 cm and 45.7 cm squares. The edition is 55 whatever the size, so scale, not scarcity, separates them.

Where Are The Prints Signed And Numbered?

Hirst signed each sheet in pencil on the front, and the edition number, out of 55, is written in pencil on the reverse. A framed print therefore shows only the signature, and the number can be read only once the sheet is out of its frame.