Episode Details

After his extraordinary 2008 Sotheby’s auction, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, which raised more than £111 million in two days, Damien Hirst described the sale as the end of an era, a “brutal change” and a chance to move away from the machinery of his career. He subsequently spent time in Bali in 2009, painting and reassessing what painting meant to him. The experience was part of a much more personal return to the canvas: Hirst had spent years making work that deliberately avoided the traditional act of painting, but he increasingly felt he could no longer hide behind mechanical processes such as the Spot and Spin paintings. In Bali, surrounded by the tropical landscape and working directly with paint, he began exploring what he called a “new painting” a quieter, more instinctive direction.

At the heart of this return was Francis Bacon, Hirst’s great artistic hero. Hirst first encountered Bacon as a teenager in Leeds and said that when he began painting himself, everything he produced looked like “bad Bacons”, so he eventually stopped painting. Yet Bacon remained lodged in his imagination. Hirst admired the way Bacon could make a recognisable figure dissolve into raw paint, creating something psychological rather than merely descriptive. He said great paintings should work from a distance but dissolve when you approach them, leaving the viewer’s own imagination to create the horror. For Hirst, Bacon represented the courage to confront death, flesh, fear and the darker side of existence and his return to painting was partly an attempt to work through that influence rather than run from it.