Damien Hirst's new works are on display in Paris: Cherry Blossoms.

Until January 2, 2022, the cherry blossoms of Damien Hirst (Bristol, 1965) are on display at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, where the exhibition Damien Hirst opened on July 6. Cherry Blossoms: the show showcases the British artist’s new series of paintings(Cherry Blossoms, paintings depicting flowering cherry trees), and it is also Hirst’s first solo exhibition at a French institution. The Cherry Blossoms series playfully and ironically reinterprets the traditional subject of landscape painting. The artist combines thick brushstrokes and elements of gestural painting, referencing both Impressionism, Pointillism, and Action Painting. The monumental canvases, entirely covered in dense, luminous colors, aim to envelop the viewer in a vast floral landscape that lies somewhere between figuration and abstraction.

These works are intended to be both a subversion of and homage to the great art movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They are an integral part of Hirst’s longstanding painterly exploration and took three years to complete. The artist finished them in November 2020: the pandemic, he said, “gave me much more time to live with the paintings, look at them and make absolutely sure everything is finished.” The complete series includes 107 canvases (all reproduced in the exhibition catalog: thirty are on display in Paris), divided into single panels, diptychs, triptychs, quadptychs and even an exacta, all large format.

“The Cherry Blossoms,” declares Hirst, “are about beauty, life and death. They are extreme; there is something almost tacky about them. They are like Jackson Pollocks tormented by love. They are decorative but drawn from nature. They are about desire and how we process things around us and what we turn them into, but also about the crazy visual transience of beauty: a tree in full and crazy bloom against a clear sky. It was so beautiful to make them, to get completely lost in color and paint in my studio. They are garish, messy and fragile and speak of me moving away from minimalism and the idea of an imaginary mechanical painter, and all of this is exciting to me.”

Born in Bristol, UK, in 1965, Hirst grew up in Leeds before moving to London in 1984, where he still lives today. Working through sculpture, installation, painting and drawing, Hirst explores themes related to life and death, excess and fragility. While sculpture, particularly the Natural History series, earned him a major reputation in his early years, painting has always played an essential role in Hirst’s work: “I’ve had a lifelong love affair with painting, even though I’ve avoided it. As a young artist, you react to the context, to your situation. In the 1980s, painting was not really the way to go.” Begun after the ten-year Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable project (works from this project were exhibited in the celebrated 2017 Venice show), the Cherry Blossoms series marks the artist’s return to solitary work in his studio, according to Hirst’s statement. Hirst rediscovers the exhilarating pleasure of painting and “diving into the paintings and slamming them completely from end to end.”

The exhibition is Hirst’s response to Fondation Cartier CEO Hervé Chandès’ invitation to the artist during a meeting in London in 2019. The works are displayed in a space designed by Jean Nouvel.

Pictured: Damien Hirst at work in his studio on the Cherry Blossoms series.

Damien Hirst's new works are on display in Paris: Cherry Blossoms.

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