Beautiful mis-shapen purity clashing excitedly outwards painitng is an exceptionally large work from the most important phase of Damien Hirst’s career. Bedecked in dazzling primary colours, the work spins on an electric motor, recalling its method of production, and creating a spell-binding visual effect. That the work has been exhibited in prestigious museum exhibitions all over the world is further tribute to its centrality within Hirst’s prestigious oeuvre. In its appreciation, we are able to discern not only Hirst’s expansive artistic vision, but also his tongue-in-cheek attitude to tradition.

Hirst made his very first Spin Paintings in 1992 in his studio in Brixton, London, titling the works with the amusingly convoluted titles that were to become the hallmark of the series. For example: Beautiful Ray of Sunshine on a Rainy Day Painting (which was the first in the series), Beautiful, cataclysmic pink minty shifting horizon exploding star with ghostly presence, wide, broad, painting, or Beautiful, pop, spinning ice creamy, whirling, expanding painting, which was created in the year of the present work. Then, in 1993, Hirst set up a spin painting stall with fellow artist Angus Fairhurst at a street art fair ‘A Fete Worse than Death’. Made-up as clowns by performance artist Leigh Bowery, Fairhurst and Hirst invited visitors to pay £1 to create their own spin paintings to be signed by the pair. When Hirst started the series in earnest in 1994 on circular shaped canvases, they became one of the most instantly recognisable and popular parts of his entire corpus. Beautiful mis-shapen purity clashing excitedly outwards painting is a consummate example, epitomising Hirst’s metaphor that the spinning vortex of paint resembles the chaotic unpredictability of existence: “The movement sort of implies life” (Damien Hirst cited in: Damien Hirst and Gordon Burn, On the Way to Work, London 2001, p. 221).

Hirst stated that the concept first came to him in the 1970s following an episode of the children’s television programme Blue Peter: “I grew up with Blue Peter. I got my idea for the spin paintings from an episode in the 1970s…I remember thinking: ‘That’s fun, whereas art is something more serious…I just thought: "Why does it have to be like that? ... Actually, the better art is the art made with the spin machine” (Damien Hirst cited in: Mark Brown, The Guardian, 29 August 2012, online). Hirst never lost his childlike sense of wonder in the process of creating these works; indeed, as the present work attests, the spin paintings embody the euphoric ecstasy of childlike exploration.