\u2018The Cherry Blossoms are about beauty and life and death. They\u2019re extreme \u2013 there\u2019s something almost tacky about them,\u2019 says Damien Hirst, describing\u00a0the new series of paintings\u00a0for\u00a0his first museum exhibition in France, devoted to, you guessed it, cherry blossoms.\u00a0\nThe show began with an invitation from Herv\u00e9 Chand\u00e8s...
with 30 paintings selected by Chandès and the artist. These vast canvases, divided into single panels, diptychs, triptychs, quadriptychs, and even a hexaptych, are saturated with vivid colours, and dizzying clusters of erupting buds that attract viewers, but also consume them.
The celebration of the blooming of cherry trees in Japan is centuries-old – a deeply-rooted cultural and philosophical symbol. Set against a clear blue sky, they are a vision of ultimate beauty, a phenomenon in their physical magnificence, their ephemerality, and also in their almost-parodic ability to tempt anyone with a camera and an Instagram account to stop in their tracks.
‘They’re decorative but taken from nature,’ says Hirst. ‘They’re about desire and how we process the things around us and what we turn them into, but also about the insane visual transience of beauty – a tree in full crazy blossom against a clear sky. It’s been so good to make them, to be completely lost in colour and in paint in my studio.’Cherry BlossomDamien Hirst: from formaldehyde sharks to
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