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But one can also see how these paintings represent a major
consolidation of themes in Hirst’s art. The artist’s fascination with
surgery, medical environments and the symbolism of mortality is
combined with his enquiries into the realism of corporeality; the
internal constitution and workings of the human body are brought
to brutal light, the wonder of their ‘mysteries’ allowed to declare
itself in its own physical language, rather than through romanticised
codes. There is also a vulnerability and disquiet to these paintings;
the ‘Happy Family’ (2006), of Hirst, his wife and their newly born
child (a group impossible not to relate to biblical themes) are both
proudly happy and vulnerable – as answerable to the vagaries
and whims of mortality as the rest of the artist’s subjects.
Hirst also, in his series of cancer screening images, for example,
‘’(2007), confronts one of modern
society’s most enduring and emotive fears. In this series of works,
combining inkjet and household gloss on canvas, with collage
elements such as glass and scalpel blades, Hirst reveals the qualities
of abstraction in the realism of medical photography. The colours
of these works – fantastical, iridescent pinks and luxuriant peacock
blue – belie the potentially tragic and immoveable nature of the
images they depict. That which appears like coral or a precious
mineral, or an imagining of a planet’s surface, might also be a
death warrant: appearance belies meaning.
As Requiem surveys Hirst’s art from the early 1990s to the present,
the viewer becomes immediately aware of the biblical scale on
which the artist is envisaging his work; in his lucidity no less than
his tireless enquiry into the unknowable sleep with which our brief
lives are surrounded, Hirst is one of the great religious artists of
the modern period. For it is only within the correlation of religion
to science, and the rational to the non-rational, that one finds the
breadth of speculation through which Hirst relates unwavering
realism to cosmic irony, bathos and splendour.
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