Spot the artist at the Gagosian

More than 300 spot paintings by British artist Damien Hirst from 1986 to the present day have gone on show simultaneously around the world.

For the first time the Gagosian Gallery has decided to show the work of one artist in its 11 galleries at the same time, including in New York, London, LA, Paris, Rome, Hong Kong, Athens and Geneva.

Hirst’s exhibition might be global but he can only be in one place at a time, so the artist attended the New York opening – attracting a pack of press interest.

“It is supposed to be a very visual experience but also a confusing experience, it affects your sense of scale of your own self and body. And in a way they sort of relate to human scale. They are sort of as different as humans are and as varied as nature can be,” said Millicent Willner, director of the Gagosian in London.

Many of the spot paintings are on loan from private collections and institutions

“He really wanted to create something that was much more formulaic, sort of machine made, although there is sort of a push and pull – they’re all painted by hand. They are all unique. There’s never a single colour repeated on any canvas. So there is a combination of incredible complexity as well as very pure simplicity,” says Willner.

The conceptual artist, whose best-known pieces include a shark suspended in formaldehyde, created his first spot painting over 25 years ago. A recent monumental work contains 25,781 spots, each only one millimetre in diameter with no single colour repeated.

Hirst has created only a small number of the canvasses himself, believing his assistants do a better painting job than he could and that he becomes easily bored.

A 20-year retrospective of the artist’s work is also scheduled to open at the Tate Modern gallery in London on April 4, 2012. The multimillionaire Hirst was awarded the prestigious Turner art prize in 1995.

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