Love him or detest him, Damien Hirst is aware of a factor or two about shock worth. Since bulldozing his approach onto the world’s stage as a part of the YBAs within the early Nineties, the artist has raised quite a lot of eyebrows together with his provocative oeuvre. Throughout his polarising profession, he’s encased a solid of a human cranium in diamonds, crammed Tate Fashionable with hundreds of butterflies, and most just lately, sparked debate over the worth of artwork together with his NFT challenge, The Forex. I shouldn’t have been shocked, then, to discover a larger-than-life-size anatomical mannequin – all muscle and veins, skull gone awol – guarding the doorway to Château La Coste, a cultured wine property (and a part of resort Villa La Coste‘s grounds) the place Hirst’s newest exhibition The Gentle That Shines has simply opened its doorways.
Damien Hirst, Heaven (2008)
On the floor, a wine property within the Provençal countryside could not seem to be the plain alternative for such up to date statements. However then, Château La Coste isn’t any peculiar property. For starters, it’s the scale of Monaco. However in lieu of superyachts, you could have super-builds: it seems like Château La Coste flipped by way of the pages of Architectural Digest and mentioned ‘I’ll have that and that…’. Throughout the property’s 500 acres, you’ll discover Frank Gehry’s relocated Serpentine Pavilion, Jenga-esque in its seemingly precarious stacking of timber beams; Oscar Niemeyer’s curved, glass-walled gallery; Richard Roger’s gravity-defying cantilever; Renzo Piano’s semi-sunken, sail-topped corridor, and quite a lot of Tadao Ando-designed areas, which vary from an all-concrete cafè-cum-art-centre, to a Sixteenth-century construction turned Modernist chapel. Hell, even the wine cellar is by Jean Nouvel.
Tadao Ando, Centre d’Artwork (2011) | Damien Hirst, Head of a Demon, Excavated 1932 (Exhibition enlargement) (2015)
Whereas Hirst is the primary artist to take over all 5 of the property’s gallery areas, there’s an unlimited everlasting assortment of large- and small-scale works, which embody the likes of Louise Bourgeois (who’s placing Maman spider crouches on water on the Château’s entrance), Ai Wei Wei, Tracey Emin, and Yoko Ono, to call a number of. These masterpieces comprise the non-public stock of proprietor Paddy McKillen, a Belfast-born entrepreneur and art-lover, who considers himself much less of a ‘collector’ and extra as an enthusiastic facilitator of his many artist buddies.
Damien Hirst, Cosmos Work (2021)
‘This magnificent present has been an thought for a few years,’ says McKillen, a longtime good friend of Hirst, ‘amid laughs and giggles, chats and cups of tea, nice concepts advanced as they do when Damien is his playful self.’ And playful it’s. Within the Outdated Wine Storehouse, bronze Meteorites and Satellites sculptures act as theatrical props, whereas the Pollock-esque Cosmos Work – impressed by long-exposure photos from Hubble Area Telescope – communicate to the anarchy of the universe, like celestial terrazzo of their riot of flecks and splatters. It’s not the artist’s first interplanetary affair, both. Artwork aficionados could keep in mind the time he despatched one in all his signature dot work to Mars aboard the Beagle 2 area probe again in 2003. Such is Hirst’s – fairly actually boundless – ambition.
Damien Hirst, Temple (2008) | Damien Hirst, Delusion (2010)
Otherworldly themes proceed additional contained in the Château’s folly-flanked forest, the place works from his 2017 Venice Biennial present Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, fill Niemeyer’s auditorium. The sequence tells the story of a Byzantine shipwreck discovered on the depths of the Indian Ocean, and the traditional treasures salvaged from its wreckage. Solely, the story is an elaborate fiction, and the treasures – which embody every thing from conventional African masks to Hellenic sculptures of sea monsters, gorgons and extra – should not historical in any respect. On nearer inspection, these objects reveal themselves to be firmly up to date; a touch upon fable, storytelling and fact, and a usually Hirst-ian prank. As I close to one explicit statue, seemingly time-worn in its inexperienced oxidation, I realise what I’m taking a look at is however a barnacle-encrusted Donald Duck.
Damien Hirst, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable (2017)
Occupying one of many property’s highest factors, Richard Roger’s Drawing Gallery is an unimaginable feat of engineering, jutting 27 metres out from the hillside and encased in vivid orange caging. Right here, Hirst pays homage to bygone empresses with a sequence of kaleidoscopic pink and black butterfly prints, every intricately outlined with gold that recall’s the Japanese apply of kintsugi. Again down on earth, the Bastide Gallery performs host to his beforehand unseen Secret Gardens Work, which look virtually AI-generated of their placing photorealism. No present of this scale could be full, after all, with out Hirst’s iconic formaldehyde items – the OG artworks that propelled him to stardom after Charles Saatchi’s landmark Sensation exhibition – and Renzo Piano’s pavilion makes a advantageous spot for them, it’s floor-to-ceiling glass partitions echoed by the sculptures’ scientific vitrines.
Richard Rogers, Galerie d’exposition (2021)
There’s loads to see, so if a brief pause on one in all Andò’s origami benches doesn’t minimize it (hearsay has it that they have been initially constructed as bus stops for Marseille), you may wish to pencil-in a spot of R ‘n’ R within the property’s reverie-inducing luxurious resort, Villa La Coste. Right here, you’ll be able to proceed your arts training in a bathrobe and slippers (reminiscence foam ones, at that) as you tuck right into a breakfast of fluffy French pastries subsequent to a Takashi Murakami, leaf leisurely by way of books on Le Corbusier and Cy Twombly, snooze beneath an Etel Adnan watercolour, or pattern the property’s rosè out of your terrace because the solar units on the Richard Serra under. No biggie.
Damien Hirst, The Monk (2014)
For hundreds of years artists have been drawn to Provence, partly for its honey-hued villages and rolling pastoral plains, but in addition due to its sharply defining mild. Matisse discovered readability in Good’s crystalline, limpid lustre; Van Gogh discovered bursts of aid beneath Arles’ yellow solar (pre ear-lobbing, that’s); and it was a distinctly Aixois glow which lit Cézanne’s path to abstraction. At Château La Coste, that mild continues to shine on Hirst and his illustrious profession, one nonetheless working on insurrection and daring ambition.
Damien Hirst: The Gentle That Shines is on from 2 March to 23 June 2024 at Château la Coste, Provence.
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Header picture Hylonome (2011), by Damien Hirst; pictures by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd and Stephanie Gavan
