Name: Ammonium Sulfamate
Brand: Damien Hirst
Rating: 5 (231 reviews)

Meaning & Analysis

Ammonium Sulfamate is a woodcut print from Damien Hirst’s 40 Woodcut Spots series from 2011. Released in a limited edition of 55, this print is a square composition with four circles positioned in each corner. Set against a plain white backdrop, the spots are depicted in flattened colours of navy blue, lime green, sky blue and baby pink. Using contrasting colours and a methodical composition, this print is an exploration of colour and form that is distinctly Hirstian.

As with all of the spot paintings that Hirst has produced in his career, this print is formulaic and crisp in form. The spots are a perfect circle and semi-circle set against a clinical white backdrop. Their clean edges and bright, flat colours indicate a lack of human touch in the production of this print. Hirst in fact employed assistants to produce them and the paintings are painstaking and laborious to produce.

Fascinated by intuitive colour choice from his days at Goldsmiths, Hirst claims that the spot paintings have removed any problems he previously had with colour, allowing him to present a perfect arrangement of colour that is never repeated. Hirst explains that, “mathematically, with the spot paintings, I probably discovered the most fundamentally important thing in any kind of art. Which is the harmony of where colour can exist on its own, interacting with other colours in a perfect format.”