Damien Hirst’s Spot Paintings, on view now simultaneously at the eleven Gagosian galleries world-wide, are inane and pleasure-giving. Hirst painted them from 1986 to 2011, in different sizes and scales, applying these basic rules: each canvas has a white background, each spot in a canvas is a different color, and each spot is almost always spaced one diameter away from the next. In discussion and in reproduction the paintings are terribly banal but in person they have a fizzy charisma. My favorite of all the ones in the three New York City galleries is a six-foot-tall square canvas with four-inch-diameter spots at the 24th Street gallery. The proportions make for a special dynamism. But the installation at the 21st Street gallery is spectacular. Here the enormous single space is given over to the paintings. They’re at crazily different scales, from tablet-sized canvases with millimeter-wide dots to TV-sized ones with single dots. The gallery feels like a giant candy shop.

It’s easy to say that the work, and the Gagosian’s around-the-world installation, are gimmicks. But the Spot Paintings are all about painting. The fields are a dry, flat white and the the hand-stenciled spots are a luscious gloss, with the ones at the perimeter kissing the edge of the stretched surface of the canvas. Conventional painterly subjects – depth, figuration, technique – have been brilliantly excised so that’s all that’s left is paint and canvas. The format is so formulaic that even graphics and composition seem irrelevant. When you look at a painting for more than one moment your eyes scan for figures, semi-automatically linking similar-colored spots that might make a larger shape. But the spots are random and no figure emerges. Your eye flickers excitedly from one color to the next (from almost-cupric-blues, to almost-crayon-reds, to almost chocolate-browns) with no success. And then the eye settles, finally, on the figure of the white field. Because this is the real subject of the paintings, and of painting. Each one is an ecstatic field of possibility.

Image credit:

Photography Prudence Cuming Associates

Was there a celebrity subject better-suited to Andy Warhol than Elizabeth Taylor? And was there an artist better-suited to the Gagosian Gallery than Andy Warhol? The gallery’s show of Warhol’s paintings of the actress, called Liz, is a perfect concoction. The paintings capture her different incarnations: child star, adult temptress, and over-exposed yet still-unknowable celebrity. There are, across the gallery’s back wall, seven canvases from the iconic headshot series. The color fields in each one, applied across a black silkscreen, are in comic book shapes and hues that flatten the actress’ legendarily fine features. There’s no depth to them, pictorially or emotionally. They’re not portraits, they’re just pictures.

On the right-hand wall of that gallery are some remarkable canvases I’ve never seen before, a series of black-on-silver prints of that same headshot. (Two of them are visible in this view.) They’re something entirely different from the colored paintings. They aren’t silkscreened with the same cool professionalism. Some are blurry, some are too dark, and some aren’t centered on the canvas. One, which captures the fiery life in Taylor’s eyes, has been cropped from the bottom so violently that it seems to fall off the canvas. The imperfections give these images an incredible gravity, an effect that’s amplified when one remembers the actress’ passing last year. These are elusive, unstable images that don’t ever really come into focus. Like Warhol’s paintings of the electric chair and a mourning Jackie Kennedy, they are images of death.