Your taste reflects your personality, so all the art in this gallery full of snark, smut and death can only be Damien Hirst’s. ‘Dominion’, curated by his son Connor in his gallery out of art from his own collection, is a portrait of a man through the art he loves, and it’s exactly what you think it’s going to be.
The show’s a mixture of peers, friends and idols. There’s a lot of art by Hirst’s mates, but luckily his mates are pretty good artists. Sarah Lucas is here in sculpture and photo; defiant, pissed off self-portraits, sniggeringly offensive toilet humour, soft, erotic bunnies. Gavin Turk pops up again and again with riffs on Warhol and Cattelan, Mat Collishaw flashes a Christ-like wound on his chest. Then there’s Marcus Harvey’s ‘Myra’, the painting that made a nation gag on its supper. It’s incredible to see it in the flesh, this vast portrait of a serial killer made out of child’s handprints, an icon of naughty ’90s culture, the ultimate spark of outrage, it’s like meeting a celebrity. All these works feel nostalgic, a teary nod to the heyday of young British art. Some of these artists have dropped off the radar, some haven’t, but it all feels like the past.
It’s not all British. A couple of amazing Richard Princes are dotted throughout (one of the cowboys, some of the jokes, a nurse), and some big glitzy Jeff Koons canvases too. Two American giants of contemporary art on a level with Hirst.
Wit, gore, morbidity, cynicism and a couple of Francis Bacons
That’s the friends and peers, but Hirst has earned enough dosh to buy work by his idols too. There are two Francis Bacons: perfect, grim, agonised little thing in the second gallery, a tormented orange beast upstairs, there’s a gorgeous tiny Franz Kline, a bunch of works by British abstract pioneer John Hoyland, a wall of Warhol electric chairs. All pretty thrilling.
Not everything’s good. All the Banksys here prove that his work is as dead-eyed, vacuous and self-satisfied in a gallery as it is in the street, and the handful of actual human skulls are eye-rollingly try-hard.
Is it well curated? I mean, there’s no narrative, no thematic threads, no tangible reason for the choices or the hang, there are works by the same artists in different spaces with no explanation and it just feels like some stuff in some rooms. So not really. But so much of the art here is good (an amazing Boo Saville painting, a gorgeous Rachel Howard work), or at least fun (the ludicrously gross Joel Peter Witkin photo), that it doesn’t hugely matter.
And anyway, the show serves another function: this is exhibition as legacy. Being curated by Hirst’s child, these are the works that will be passed down to him, this is the art collection equivalent of genes, a set of markers, ideas, traits, passed from father to son. Wit, gore, morbidity, cynicism and a couple of Francis Bacons, it’s not a bad inheritance.
