Over the last 24 years, Damien Hirst has produced on average 60 Spot Paintings a year. Cefoperazone forms part of this series, which in turn contains a section of ‘Pharmaceutical’ pieces. Their titles taken arbitrarily from Sigma-Aldrich’s catalogue of medicines, these pieces mark a connection between color and drugs. In Cefoperazone, Hirst depicts brightly multi-colored dots organized into neat lines that can be read as diagramatic images of pharmaceutical pills. This piece investigates and challenges contemporary belief systems that trust fully in medicine but not in art, without questioning either.

© Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS / SOMAAP / México/ 2020.