Name: Isovanillin
Brand: Damien Hirst
Rating: 5 (234 reviews)

Track auction value trend

The value of Damien Hirst’s Isovanillin (signed) is estimated to be worth between £11,500 and £17,000. This woodcut print, created in 2011, has shown strong value growth, with an average annual growth rate of 23%. This work is part of a limited edition of 55 and has an auction history of two sales since its entry to the market in December 2017. Over the past five years, the hammer price has varied, with an average return to the seller of £8,568.

Auction Date

Auction House

Location

Hammer Price

Return to Seller

Buyer Paid

March 2022

Sotheby's Online

United Kingdom

December 2017

Christie's New York

United States

Meaning & Analysis

Isovanillin is a woodcut print from Damien Hirst’s 40 Woodcut Spots series from 2011. The print shows various coloured spots arranged methodically into three rows of four. Each spot is a different colour and every print in the series represents a unique set of colour combinations.

When Hirst’s first spot paintings appeared in the Freeze exhibition of 1988, this marked a turning point in the artist’s career where he began to employ assistants to create the spot paintings. As artificial as the chemicals and drugs that the titles take their inspiration from, the spot paintings appear to have been produced mechanically and without human intervention. Despite their deceiving simplicity, these works are laborious and painstaking 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.”