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If contemporary art is to be, let it be powerful and jaw-dropping. On Damien Hirst in St. Moritz.

by Luca Zuccala , published on 27/03/2021
Categories: Exhibition reviews / Disclaimer

Review of Damien Hirst's "Mental Escapology" exhibition, Sankt Moritz, St. Moritzersee and Protestant Church, Feb. 5 to April 5, 2021.

The term Escapology refers to the ability of an artist, usually a magician, to free himself or herself from physical constraints. WhenEscapology becomes “Mental,” the liberation is the result of the artist’s sublimation through a symbolic material translation, but also a more common escape from reality through dreaming, thinking. Exorcising the obsession with death by crystallizing its end or, much more simply, floating a balloon in the air by capturing its magic and wonder (a breath of life), is the perpetual Mental Escapology of one of the holy monsters of contemporary art: Damien Hirst (Bristol, 1965).

The former YBA bad boy brings his Mental Escapology, that’s the title of the exhibition (through April 5), to the eternal snows of the Engadine, in Sankt Moritz, Switzerland. And he does it superbly (he, Hirst, accompanied by the curator, Jason Beard, and the organizers, Oscar Humphries and Marco Voena), weaving a dense web of aesthetic and allegorical tangents that reverberate from the rose windows of the Protestant Church, in the heart of the old town, to the glacial refractions of the lake in front: Mandalas studded with iridescent butterflies echo the church’s sacred stained-glass windows; the colored balls bouncing freely under vitrines skewer analytically in the Spot Paintings scattered around the Forum Paracelsius; vitrine looks at vitrine: the aseptic, almost macabre display case, with surgical instruments lined up to the millimeter next to each other (an icy minimalist sculpture), opposite: the cesarean delivery kit painted on canvas; the inflatable balloons that flutter in the air (like butterflies), bounce off the walls in the Pharmaceutical paintings, and remain suspended like the Bouillabalanced, Calder-model installation (less poetic) with fish immersed in formaldehyde; formaldehyde, the “eternal” organic compound made famous by Hirst himself through the “Shark” of 1991, which saturates the six-legged calf in the center of the nave, like the two severed sheep heads contemplating each other at the Forum; formalin which, unintentionally, participates in the game of cross-references by condensing, at the more than 1,800 meters of altitude of Sankt Moritz on the walls of the display cases, into perfectly circular lumps (like Mandalas and polka dots).

Rinascimento in Valtiberina e Valdichiana

Damien Hirst, Temple (2008), veduta dell'installazione al Sankt Moritzersee, 2021. Foto di Felix Friedmann. Â©Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. Tutti i diritti riservati, DACS 2021

Damien Hirst, The Monk (2014), veduta dell'installazione al Sankt Moritzersee, 2021. Foto di Felix Friedmann. Â©Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. Tutti i diritti riservati, DACS 2021

Damien Hirst, Two figures with a drum (2013), veduta dell'installazione al Sankt Moritzersee, 2021. Foto di Felix Friedmann. Â©Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. Tutti i diritti riservati, DACS 2021

Damien Hirst, Proteus (2012), veduta dell'installazione al Sankt Moritzersee, 2021. Foto di Felix Friedmann. Â©Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. Tutti i diritti riservati, DACS 2021

A latticework of correspondences in Damien Hirst’s parable that finds its fulfillment in the sculptural triptych lying on the St. Moritzersee. Moritzersee, the lake, and its banks: from the two relics of the fictitious wreck found in the depths of an undefined location off the coast of Africa, exhibited between the halls of Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana in Venice in 2017(Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable), to the “anatomy lesson” overlooking the ice from the top of the historic Hotel Waldhaus in all its more than six and a half meters of dissected and painted bronze. No Hirst exhibition goes unnoticed; he and his work do the talking, always and in any case; they make noise, in whatever sense the buzz, more or less educated but often also crude, involves it and you want to consider it. First, in the most impactful mode: the blades of the helicopter swooped over the frozen lake to lower the majestic The Monk, one of the relics, with all the sea concretions proliferating from the film of frost to the hands covering the face, the first work of art ever to be displayed on the surface of the lake. Secondly, because of the din that the presence of Damien Hirst’s figure, however you want to see it, brilliant, cynical, ruthless, visionary, systematically provokes. It cannot be ignored. Neither he nor his art. Even more so in the undefined and compassed, often pointless and self-referential circus of contemporary art.

If this is to be made, contemporary art, Hirst explains to us, let it be majestic, powerful, jaw-dropping. And let it be done with all the trappings, ça va sans dire, from the curatorship to the layout to the catalog (complete with detachable double artist’s postcards hidden in the flaps of the dust jacket). This is how the Swiss exhibition, the first public exhibition in Switzerland, was conceived. Forty-one works, in the end, scattered around the town and its surroundings, from the two pulsating centers mentioned earlier, the neoclassical Forum Paracelsus and the Protestant Church (protected by the Proteus, a bronze oracle and shape-shifter, placed in the churchyard), to the three gravitational hinges located on the lake mirror. There is a bit of everything in the exhibition, much of Hirst’s repertoire: life and death, vanitas, irony, the sacred, the playful, anguish, tragedy and psychotic romanticism. There is medicine, myth, magic, religion, procreation: the tools enacted by men to exorcise the fear of death, panaceas to buffer the decay of the flesh and the suffering of the psyche. There is that, after all, all it takes is the magic of a ball floating unconstrained in the air (the series is titled precisely Mental Escapology like the exhibition) to make life shine and death recede. Like the metallic light vibration of a butterfly’s wing, a pulse of life embedded forever in the canvas.

Veduta della mostra Mental Escapology (Sankt Moritz, Forum Paracelsus, 2021). Foto di Felix Friedmann. Â©Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. Tutti i diritti riservati, DACS 2021

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.

If contemporary art is to be, let it be powerful and jaw-dropping. On Damien Hirst in St. Moritz.

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