Apocryphally,, and we all know Hirst's legendary ability to sell himself as much as his art, his fascination with spin paintings can be traced back to childhood. Indeed, he has previously stated that at the tender age of 9 in 1975, he first encountered the style on the popular British Children’s TV show Blue Peter recalling host John Noakes creating colourful paintings from a motorised cardboard spinning machine. Inspiration for the Spin paintings also came from a school summer fete Hirst went to when he was six or seven years old, he explains. “They had a fruit crate with a motor in the middle… [with] little postcards and you’d bulldog-clip them on and squirt tubes of paint at it. You couldn’t drag me away, I loved it.”
Fast forward 20 years to the early 90’s, where Kss from a Rose by Seal was in the charts,Tony Blair promised to make the UK young again and, against this explosive backdrop of youth culture,Damien Hirst began to produce his Spin Paintings.
The ongoing series, started around 1995, is recognisable as much for the colourful works as for the long titles that often use the words, such as beautiful, insane, insensitive, erupting, liquid, ice, vice painting, and beautiful, shattering, slashing, violent, pinky, hacking and sphincter painting.
To create them Hirst stands on a ladder and pours paint onto large circular canvases as they are rotated at high speed by a spin machine in his studio. The idea of using spin art to make high art came from Hirst’s collaborative participation with the artist Angust Fairhurst in the event ‘A Fete Worse than Death’, organised by curator Joshua Compston in Shoreditch, London in 1993 - Ever the brilliant showman, the two were dressed as clowns . Curator Gregor Muir has recounted:
Using an inverted electric drill and a piece of wood onto which they could fasten sheets of paper, Fairhurst and Hirst set up a spin painting stall – an idea borrowed from a once popular children’s game using painting and an old record player cranked up to 78rpm. A spin painting cost £1 to produce and was signed by both artists on the reverse. In Hirst’s case, the idea proved too useful to be left behind, resulting in his subsequent ‘Spin Paintings’.
Many of these titles also make reference to the movement of rotation in one way shape or form; the first, ‘Wheel meet again”, is a pun that plays on the interchange between ‘we’ll’ and the word ‘wheel’. Others evoke the mundane, domestic life ‘‘There’s more to life than making jam and having kids’ , Oh my God ...and for those really stubborn stains!!!!!??* and the humorous ‘You threw a melon at my head’.
Of course, Hirst's use of a spin machine to create his works recall the visual experiments of Marcel Duchamp.. But while Duchamp used rotating discs for optical illusions, Hirst uses them with a more expressionistic aim as shown by his use of the word beautiful in many of the titles.
Indeed, back in 2020 Hirst collaborated with social media platform Snapchat as a charity endeavour to create an augmented reality lens that allowed users to make and share their own version of his famous Spin painting series In the virtual version, users were able to choose colours to “pour” onto a rotating disc appearing on the floor of their own space via the AR lens and save and share the work. They can then save and share their artwork, meaning “anyone can make a Spin painting now,” Hirst says in a video introducing the project. “I can’t believe how well it’s turned out. It’s really simple… and reaches millions of people.”
Indeed, the works themselves gyrate around the central concept of control and the lack thereof. Paraphrased, Hirst has said that the works are one of the purest examples of abstract art where the natural forces that make up our universe (centrifugal force and gravity) lend themselves to the artist and his quest for pure expression.
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