26/10/2009 No Love Lost by Damien Hirst at The Wallace Collection
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With 'No Love Lost', The Wallace Collectionis hosting a much unexpected exhibition. The artist behind it, Damien Hirst,is some kind of heir of the 'weird' abstract painters where the place usually features classical or even baroque type of art. I personally love both the Wallace Collection and abstract painting but the meeting of both is an outstanding great idea!
Hung in the traditional galleries of The Wallace Collection, your guests will be able to enjoy the visual dialogue between Hirst’s works and the Old Master paintings displayed in the museum’s opulent galleries.
Receptions can be held throughout our stunning first floor galleries along side a remarkable array of masterpieces by artists such as Rembrandt, Titian Hals and Velazquez
'No Love Lost' exhibition contains only 25 pieces in two rooms but I believed I saw maybe 2 paintings that are going to stay in the history of art and at least in my memory as masterpieces.
One is called "Floating Skull". It represents a skull and involves some kind of strong spot light technique which makes the painting likes emitting lights. It displays the skull like a 3D object. As a result, the skull seems to free itself from the frame: absolutely stunning! I think that anyone seeing it, notice how singular it is.
I would have love to put a picture of it but no picture can properly display what is does because its effect is mainly based on the reflection of the light, the paint material and the thickness of the brushstrokes. The only way I see to show this piece would but through real-time computer graphics... It would be quite exciting as an experiment for me!
The second one is called "Requiem, White Roses and Butterflies" and it shows bellow. Again, like with "Floating Skull", it is remarkable how this painting ignore the frame to exist beyond it. The white perspective lines, the thickness of the roses and butterflies, the brushstrokes and the size of the painting generate a feeling of volume, of large empty space, of swallow in a dim universe.
An exhibition book is available with all the paintings of this exhibition. The quality is good but the paintings really need to be seen real. It's not much text but it ends with a conversation between John Hoyland and Damien Hirst that just deserved to be read: Artists they came across, past stories, tastes, inspirations and 'fuck' everywhere as proper British sentences need to be grammatically correct.
The exhibition is on until the 24th January 2010 for free but donations welcome and it should not be missed!