English artist Damien Hirst. Still image from the 2010 documentary "The Future of Art" by Erik Niedling and Ingo Niermann, 2010
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A woman driving her Rolls-Royce in Palm Beach crashed into a multi-million dollar Damien Hirst sculpture in the yard of an art collector’s mansion and then smashed through a seawall and on to the beach.
The crash took place on March 31st. The 66-year-old driver, Elizabeth Raese, is the founder of the Conservative Women of West Virginia. Raese told police that she could not remember the hours before the crash. She was transported to the hospital and, so far, has not been charged, but the crash is still being investigated.
The sculpture that Raese hit, titled Sphinx, was created by Hirst as part his 2017 Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable show in Venice. Sphinx belongs to hedge-fund manager and art collector Steven Tananbaum and his wife, Lisa. It is valued at about $3 million.
Both the Rolls and the statue reportedly sustained damage.
In the 1990s, Damien Hirst created a series of Spin Paintings by standing on a ladder and dripping bold shades of paint onto rotating canvasses. Thirty years have passed since then, technology has advanced and Hirst has embraced it all.
He collaborated with HENI Editions to create an A.I. Generator that allowed users to make their own Spin Paintings, called The Beautiful Paintings, through April 10th.
Once the works were generated they could be bought as an NFT, a physical piece, or both.
The A.I. algorithm also generated names for the colors used, like Blueberry Brûlée for indigo blue and Mountain Man for forest green. The program also inserted descriptive words between Beautiful and Paintings to create titles for the works. Some of titles it came up with were Beautiful Very Undigested Painting, Beautiful Ennobled Painting and Beautiful Dear And Welcome Implosion Painting.
Larry Poons current show at the Yares Art Gallery in New York includes some very large paintings that were done in his East Durham studio in upstate New York in 2022.
At age 85, Poons still rides motorcycles and obsesses over the music of Beethoven and Mozart.
When the show opened, Poons told guests, “If people are happy with what has been seen, or heard or read, it’s not a victory for the person whose name might be on the book or the paintings, but it’s a real victory for art.”
Larry Poons helped advance contemporary art with his abstract color field paintings and, ultimately, his textured style that make his work so unique.
Larry Poons: The Outerlands will be on view at Yares Art through April 22, 2023.
References:
Dan Ladden-Hall. Florida GOP Donor Plowed Rolls-Royce Into $3M Damien Hirst Sculpture: Reports. Daily Beast. April 14, 2023.
Tori Latham. A Florida Woman Crashed Her Rolls-Royce Into a $3 Million Damien Hirst Sculpture. The Robb Report. April 13, 2023.
Alexander Anderson. $3m Damian Hirst sculpture damaged after woman reverses Rolls-Royce into collector’s garden. The Telegraph. April 14, 2023.
Richard Whiddington. Damien Hirst Is No Longer Making His Signature Spin Paintings. Instead, He’s Unveiled a New A.I. Generator So You Can Make Them Yourself. Artnet News. April 3, 2023.
Robert C Morgan. Larry Poons: The Outerlands at Yares Art. Whitehot Magazine. April 2023.
David Ebony. Larry Poons: The Outerlands. The Brooklyn Rail. April 2023.
