Damien Hirst

With spurts of blue, yellow and green shooting vertically, and green, yellow and red horizontally, Damien Hirst’s tapestry ‘Enter the Infinite – Dream’ is incredibly potent. Based on a ‘Spin Painting’ from 2008, Hirst juxtaposes its aesthetic of randomness here with his careful mathematical process of division, reflection and repetition.  

Such exactness nonetheless produces sporadic visual reactions. The tapestry takes the eye on an uneasy journey into and out of the work’s centre. The eye cannot contain the patterns of colours and the shifting perspectives of inward and outward motion, the design thus constituting a reflection on its limits and functions. 

Hirst’s experimentations with the eye are also present in the medium itself: the jacquard-woven process requires only a small selection of colours which the eye optically blends. That ‘Enter the Infinite – Dream’ is a tapestry also links it to the medium’s historical associations to concepts such as belief and spectacle, which Hirst explores elsewhere in his practice.  

‘Enter the Infinite – Dream' is visually arresting as it apparently captures the intense motion of the spinning technology in a moment of stasis. Motion, expanded and emphasised, emerges as both the image’s unequivocally awe-inspiring form and composition.  

Enter the Infinite - Dream

Enter the Infinite

With spurts of blue, yellow and green shooting vertically, and green, yellow and red horizontally, Damien Hirst’s tapestry ‘Enter the Infinite – Dream’ is incredibly potent. Based on a ‘Spin Painting’ from 2008, Hirst juxtaposes its aesthetic of randomness here with his careful mathematical process of division, reflection and repetition.  