Posterbills went up across Berlin recently announcing a cultural coup… for Leipzig. The small regional city in Saxony is hosting a preview of Damien Hirst’s new exhibition Dark Trees.
From tomorrow, the superstar British artist will display eight new paintings in Leipzig’s Spinnerei art complex, an old cotton spinning factory-turned-culture precinct. The preview comes ahead of a full exhibition in Mexico City later this year.
The commercial art world reacted with some surprise to Hirst’s move toward oil-on-canvas painting. He’s better known for suspending dead animals in formaldehyde than for picking up a paint brush. A recent review of Hirst’s painted works in the Financial Times reacted skeptically and a little sarcastically, calling the collection “a sculptor’s paintings”, pointing out the works’ enormous debt to Francis Bacon, and suggesting his move toward canvas was due to his “grasp on the market.”
So how did Hirst end up in Leipzig, bypassing Berlin and all its cultural buzz?
The answer is explained by Hirst’s recent partnership with the Mexican art dealer Hilario Galguera, a former architect who has become rising star in the contemporary art world as the manager of many big-name artists. Galguera has earned a small fortune presenting a parade of such artists in Mexico City. In 2008 he opened a second gallery in the Spinnerei.
From the late ‘90s on, Leipzig enjoyed a flurry of attention as a generation of its painters known as the New Leipzig School came to prominence across the contemporary art world. That buzz has since died down somewhat, but perhaps Hirst’s Leipzig appearance might spark a mini-revival – or, at least, draw a few busloads of tourists.
Damien Hirst: Dark Trees
Galeria Hilario Galguera
Spinnerei, Leipzig
January 16 – February 06, 2010
