Collector's Guide: Damien Hirst | Spots

“My first ever Spot painting was loose and painted with drippy paint and not minimal at all. In that painting, I was wrestling with what I originally thought of as the coldness of Minimalism and the more emotional Abstract Expressionist painting style I’d grown up with. At the time I painted it, it felt uncool and I abandoned it immediately for the rigidity of the grid, removing the mess, but after doing the Spot catalogue raisonné I’ve felt really drawn to that first painting and knew I’d revisit it eventually.” - Damien Hirst

- Abrus Toxin - 1991 | Household gloss on canvas | 116 x 80cm

The Pharmaceutical Series encompasses paintings, medicine cabinets and installations, but it also gave rise to one of Hirst's most recognisable bodies of work: the Spot Paintings. Composed of evenly spaced coloured circles arranged in a precise grid, the Spot Paintings were inspired by pharmaceutical tablets and the ordered systems of scientific classification. Their apparent perfection and endless variation reflect both the optimism of medical progress and the impersonal nature of modern healthcare.

Although the Spot Paintings appear mechanically produced, Hirst insisted that no two spots within a painting should ever be the same colour. Across thousands of Spot Paintings created by Hirst and his studio assistants, this simple rule became a defining feature of one of the most celebrated series in contemporary art.

- Amphotericin B - 1993 | Household gloss on canvas | 295 x 336cm

3-(5-Chloro 2 Hydroxphenylazo)-4, 5 Dihydroxy-2, 7-Naphthalenedisulfonic Acid - 1998

Household gloss paint on canvas | 213.36 x 518.16 cm

Contemporary Evening Art Sale | Phillips, London | 28th February 2008

Estimate: £1,500,000 - £2,500,000

Sold: £1,756,500

In 2021, Damien Hirst launched The Currency. The project comprised 10,000 unique, hand-painted Spot works, each paired with an NFT, forcing collectors to make an irreversible choice: keep the physical artwork and destroy the NFT, or keep the NFT while the original painting was burned. When the decision was closed, 5,149 collectors chose the physical works, while 4,851 opted for the NFTs. Those 4,851 original paintings were then ceremonially destroyed at Hirst's Newport Street Gallery, leaving the NFTs as the only surviving versions. It remains one of the largest intentional destructions of original artworks ever undertaken by a living artist, redefining ideas of ownership, scarcity and value in the digital age.

- The Currency: Wanting to Play | Enamel paint in colours on handmade watermarked paper | 30cm x 21cm

From the outset, Hirst never intended the Spot Paintings to be a finite series. Instead, he conceived them as a system capable of generating an infinite number of unique compositions, with every variation in colour, scale and format creating a new work. Hirst famously described the Spots as "a machine that makes paintings", removing the artist's hand in favour of an idea that could continue indefinitely. Remarkably, despite producing more than 1,300 Spot paintings between 1986 and 2011, no single painting repeats a colour within the same composition, reinforcing the endless possibilities at the heart of the series.