Peter Doig’s visionary paintings and prints transform ordinary moments from life into enthralling compositions bursting with colour. His practice is in constant conversation with his itinerant lifestyle, resulting in images with suggestive narratives that are deeply embedded in the artist’s sense of place. Doig’s works are personal reflections on his life experiences and the world that surrounds him, drawing on memories and stories to construct relatable images. 

Born in 1959 in Edinburgh, Doig’s early life was nomadic, spent across Trinidad, Canada and Britain. In 1979 Doig began his studies at Wimbledon School of Art, moving on to Central St. Martins for his BA before receiving his MA in 1990 from Chelsea College of Art. Whilst at Chelsea, Doig created what would become some of his most famous paintings, including ‘Milky Way’ (1989-90) – a superb work exemplifying his reverence for nature. Doig's highly representational style, self-described as “filmic” and infused with a sense of solitude, stood in sharp contrast to the conceptual and minimalist art that consumed his peers in London at the time. 

After Chelsea, Doig’s output during the 1990s was exceptionally fruitful. His subject was often Canadian snowscapes, turning out generative works such as ‘Blotter’ (1993), ‘Ski Jacket’, (1994) and ‘Olin MK IV’ (1995-96). In 1991 he won the Whitechapel Young Artist Award, and in 1994 he was nominated for the Turner Prize. 

In 2000, Doig won an artist residency in Trinidad and returned to the island for the first time since childhood. During this period, he resumed painting his immediate surroundings, in works like ‘Grande Rivière’ (2001-02), which depicts a place on the island where Doig stayed, and ‘100 Years Ago (Carrara)’ (2001), which shows a person in a canoe with the prison island of Carrara, just off the coast of Port of Spain, in the background.

In 2002, Doig moved his family to Trinidad permanently, initiating a new phase in his career. Following his interests during his residency, he continued to draw upon his life and experiences on the island, as well as the history and sensibility of the country in his work. As is true across his practice, Doig used found images and photographs taken by himself as aids to produce his paintings, allowing him to capture specific details and convey certain atmospheres. 

Since his move to Trinidad, Doig has worked across the world, including in New York and London, to produce images that are dream-like in quality and construction, joining real and imagined elements. The results are often ordinary and everyday scenes, such as a man walking with an umbrella in ‘Lapeyrouse Wall’ (2004) or a cricket game in ‘Paragon’ (2006), as well as somewhat fantastical visions, like a lion roaming outside the prison in Port of Spain in ‘Lion (Fire Down Below)’ (2019) or the Christ-like skier in ‘Holy Mountain’ (2021). In 2018, Doig began a series of trips to Zermatt, Switzerland, reviving his interest in snowscapes and making paintings that not only capture moments from his time in the resort town, but also feelings, observations and atmospheres.

Doig continues to produce works which functions as the recordings of an acute observer. His thoughtful reflections on the everyday produce beautiful images that beg viewers to take a second look, and reconsider what we classify as mundane. 

Peter Doig

Peter Doig’s visionary paintings and prints transform ordinary moments from life into enthralling compositions bursting with colour. His practice is in constant conversation with his itinerant lifestyle, resulting in images with suggestive narratives that are deeply embedded in the artist’s sense of place. Doig’s works are personal reflections on his life experiences and the world that surrounds him, drawing on memories and stories to construct relatable images. 

Gerhard Richter’s artistic explorations, which stretch over more than six decades, constitute a radical attempt to integrate representation and abstraction. Best known for his painted copies of black and white photographs rendered with a blurred effect, Richter has broadened the potentials of both photography and painting.

Born 1932 in Dresden, Germany, Richter’s childhood was affected by the rise of the Nazi regime and the traumatic events of World War II. According to some of his critics, these painful memories, combined with a regimented life in East Germany under Soviet rule, discouraged him from conveying ideological expressions through art. Such unpretentious perspective materialises in his continued focus on colour combinations and on the tangible quality of his canvases. 

Richter began his studies at the Dresden Art Academy in 1951, but disliked their dogmatic emphasis on Social Realist art. In 1961, Richter fled to West Germany where he studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In this liberated, experimental environment, Richter first produced his photopaintings. 
Richter admits Pop Art gave him the license to use photography in his photopaintings. Like Warhol, he saw in photography’s mechanical recording a way to build a machine-like aesthetic that denied artistic involvement. Sourcing photographs from family albums, newspapers and magazines, Richter was interested in the photograph’s status as reproduction, as one stage removed from reality. The photopaintings function like echoes of distant worlds. This dissociation from the subject was developed in his signature blur, created by running a dry brush through the wet paint. In the photopaintings of his family, these distancing effects resonate a sense of confusion of how to make sense of their difficult history. 

Richter advanced this dissociative language in his printmaking practice. From his early editions, such as ‘Dogs’ (1965), to the 2017 Giclée print of ‘Tulips’ (1995) the artist employs the medium as an extra layer of aesthetic distance, being based off a painted image. At the same time, the print completes the work’s cycle, which started with a photographic image that was abstracted in paint and ended with the painted image returned to its photographic state.

Alongside his photopaintings, Richter has developed new possibilities for abstract art which build on his aesthetic of non-involvement. The first abstract series ‘Colour Charts’ (1966) was based on paint charts found in hardware stores and reproduce their geometric grids of colour. Later geometric abstractions used a random computer-generated selection to arrange colours by chance. One of his most intricate, ‘4096 colours’ (1974) would inform the design of Richter’s monumental stained glass windows for the south transept of the Cathedral of Cologne (2007). 

Unwilling to stick to one genre, in his ‘Works Behind Glass’ (2008-10) Richter embraced a free form abstraction. In these, poured enamel paint is squelched flat between glass sheets. Recreated as print editions, the Diasec-mounted chromogenic print on aluminium brilliantly captures the harsh flattening effects of the glass; indeed, the flattening becomes more extreme in the print as the layers of physical paint are less distinguishable.  The spectator is invited to abandon themselves to the Dionysian swirls of paint. 

The diversity of Richter’s oeuvre is remarkable, but equally extraordinary is the consistency of his vision. Throughout his work, he promotes an art that denies artistic involvement. Through this, Richter lays bare a natural beauty: from his tender and diffuse early photopaintings to the vibrant exaltation of colour in his glass paintings. 

Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter’s artistic explorations, which stretch over more than six decades, constitute a radical attempt to integrate representation and abstraction. Known for his painted copies of black and white photographs rendered with a blurred effect, Richter has broadened the potentials of both photography and painting.  

Colourful spots, animals frozen in time, glorious butterfly wings and a skull set with diamonds are just some icons of Damien Hirst’s boundary-redefining career. Internationally recognised for his irreverent approach to artmaking, blurring the lines between media and expanding their possibilities, Hirst has helped set contemporary art on a practically limitless course. Through a decisive interplay of technology, technique and material, Hirst’s artworks engage with his signature themes of love, death, religion, science, belief and beauty to create works that are both visually and conceptually compelling.

Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol, grew up in Leeds and moved to London in 1984. While studying at Goldsmiths School of Art from 1986-89, Hirst invented two fundamental series: his ongoing ‘Spot Paintings’, made up of meticulously rendered spheres of random colours arranged in perfect grid systems; and his ‘Medicine Cabinets’, an early investigation into science, medicine and systems of belief and trust that resurfaces across his oeuvre.  

In 1992, Hirst unveiled arguably his most iconic work ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ (1991), a four-metre-long tiger shark preserved in a tank of formaldehyde, and inserted his ‘Natural History’ series into the public consciousness. These sculptures simultaneously confront viewers with their own mortality and the unavoidable fate of death.

Hirst’s enduring confrontations with death emerge again in his butterfly works. Since his 1991 exhibition ‘In and Out of Love’, he has continued to readapt the butterfly motif. Hirst produces awe-inspiring compositions using their wings, as in his ‘Kaleidoscope’ series began in 2001, a formula that has entered a new chapter in the HENI prints series ‘The Aspects’ (H6, 2019), ‘The Elements’ (H6, 2020) and ‘The Empresses’ (H10, 2022). In these collections, the technology and materiality of the prints advance the symbolic resonance of the butterfly, standing for the possibility of beauty in death. 

Since 1994, Hirst has produced his joyful ‘Spin Paintings’. These works are made with minimal artist intervention, the final product reliant only on colour choice and force of movement. These paintings inspired ‘Enter the Infinite’ (H1, 2016), 12 jacquard-woven tapestries that constitute further delegation of the artistic process to a machine. ‘The joy of colour’ and colour relationships are themes to which Hirst frequently returns, as in ‘Colour Charts’ (2012), ‘Colour Space’ (2016), ‘Veil Paintings’ (2017) and their eponymous print series. 

In 2017, Hirst revealed ‘Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable’, which include hundreds of sculptures and drawings apparently salvaged from a shipwreck. This project foregrounded Hirst’s interest in belief systems, questioning structures that attract trust and value. Hirst’s 2021 project ‘The Currency’ further explores this idea, asking collectors to choose between the traditional medium of painting and the contemporary NFT, forcing them to put faith in where they see value. 

From 2018-20, Hirst produced ‘Cherry Blossoms’. The monumental canvases, entirely covered in dense, bright colours, envelop the viewer in a vast landscape of blooming trees that traverses the boundaries of figuration and abstraction. From these works, Hirst made his ‘Fruitful & Forever’ (H8, 2020) and ‘The Virtues’ (H9, 2021) print series, playfully presenting macro and micro details of the paintings that bring their tactile impasto to the fore. 

Hirst’s name is synonymous with contemporary art, continually pushing the boundaries of traditional approaches to and conceptions of the artwork. Hirst’s prints, editions and multiples are a fundamental part of this practice. Though wide-ranging in nature, together these works are magnificent exercises in how technique, technology and materiality can be manipulated to enhance the discourse and reception of Hirst’s subjects. 

Damien Hirst

Colourful spots, animals frozen in time, glorious butterfly wings and a skull set with diamonds are just some icons of Damien Hirst’s boundary-redefining career. Internationally recognised for his irreverent approach to artmaking, blurring the lines between media and expanding their possibilities, Hirst has helped set contemporary art on a practically limitless course. Through a decisive interplay of technology, technique and material, Hirst’s artworks engage with his signature themes of love, death, religion, science, belief and beauty to create works that are both visually and conceptually compelling.

Arthur Jafa is an American artist who works seamlessly across film, photography, happenings, moving image and sound installation, found material and prints. His work explores and questions the Black experience in American culture, encompassing its beauty, power and alienation.

Jafa was born in 1960 and grew up in a segregated Mississippi, recalling that he attended first grade at of the first schools to be integrated. From a young age, Jafa was interested in identity and self- expression. He has commented that he doesn’t remember a time when he didn’t feel aware of other people’s projections and perceptions, which inevitably influenced his own. Jafa moved to Washington D.C. to study film and architecture at Howard University where he first encountered the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 70s, leading him to begin thinking about how his work might fit into the history of Black aesthetics.

During the 1990s, Jafa worked in the film industry as Director of Photography and cinematographer on numerous internationally recognised movies, including Julie Dash’s ‘Daughters of the Dust’ (1991), Spike Lee’s ‘Crooklyn’ (1994) and Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ (1999). After a few years away from the arts, in the 2010s Jafa worked with musicians such as Solange, Beyoncé and Jay-Z in creating their music videos. His interest in dismantling monolithic representations of Blackness took on a new energy around this time, spurring on a wave of diverse artistic creation and fluidly moving across various media.

In 2016, Jafa displayed the hundreds of binders of images he had been collecting for decades at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, featuring material derived first from libraries and newsstands and then the internet, and content ranging from academic texts to comic books, high art to celebrity culture. Displayed on the walls of a gallery, the books became a visual lexicon of diasporic Blackness and a realistically thorough account of the diversity of Black being. In the same year, Jafa received international critical acclaim for ‘Love is the Message, the Message is Death’, a short film of found footage documenting both the suffering and beauty of Black experience, set against the music of Kanye West’s ‘Ultralight Beam’. 

The following year, the Serpentine Gallery in London worked with Jafa on the exhibition ‘A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions’. In this, Jafa presented a new series of assembled images, both found and original, alongside that of other Black artists, addressing the radical alienation of Black life in the West.

Jafa has explained that “one of the basic conundrums of Black being is that the very things that have oppressed us are the very things that define who we are and if we erase all the suppression and stuff, we sort of erase ourselves”. These themes of absence, haunting and melancholia are often paired alongside empowerment in Jafa’s work, often making for jarring viewing. Take ‘LA Haze I’ (T1) and ‘LA Haze II’ (T2) for example – absent of figures but bursting with meaning specific to the Black life in south LA.

Jafa’s confident fluency in working with images arises from his engagement with and meticulous archiving of visual content from a young age. The content of his assembled books derives from mass produced and widely distributed images, a theme that translates naturally into printmaking and intersects with the artist’s lifelong aspiration to identify the aesthetics of a relatable Black experience.

Arthur Jafa 

Arthur Jafa is an American artist who works seamlessly across film, photography, happenings, moving image and sound installation, found material and prints. His work explores and questions the Black experience in American culture, encompassing its beauty, power and alienation.

Road to Zermatt

Mercy

Cage

Waldhaus

Lost

Zermatt

The Virtues

Brian Clarke

Summer Solstice Spitfires

The Empresses

HENI is delighted to present ’Where the Land Meets the Sea’, 12 unique prints after works from Damien Hirst’s latest series ’Coast Paintings’, ’Sea Paintings’ and ’Seascapes’.

Where the Land Meets the Sea Editions

HENI Editions, Fondation Beyeler and Serpentine Gallery are delighted to present ‘Collages’, a series of eight prints after some of Brian Clarke’s most enthralling recent collages.

Collages

The Beautiful Paintings is a revolutionary new artwork from Damien Hirst that blurs the boundaries between digital and physical art creation.


The Beautiful Paintings

‘Rubikcubism’ is a series of four colour-filled prints after
Invader’s eponymous series of Rubik’s Cube-based sculptures.

Invader

RUBIKCUBISM

The Empresses is a series of prints constructed from images of red butterfly wings, intricately arranged with a filigree of red glitter to produce visually intoxicating, kaleidoscope-like effects. 

Based on a selection of paintings produced during his time in Zermatt, Switzerland, Peter Doig’s ‘Zermatt’ (D1, 2022) series triumphantly marks the artist’s return to snowscapes for the first time since the 1990s.

The Zermatt Series

The Cage (P19) series consists of six prints representing each of Richter’s ‘Cage’ paintings, scaled down. In the ‘Cage’ paintings, Richter pushed and pulled layers of paint across the surfaces of his canvases in horizontal or vertical bands. 

Cage Prints

The Virtues is a set of eight cherry blossom prints. The prints are each titled after one of The Eight Virtues of Bushidō according to Nitobe Inazō.

These striking prints provide an extraordinary new perspective on The Currency collection, using extremely high-resolution images to focus in on singular details of the painted works.

About HENI Editions