When he opened his private museum, the Newport Street Gallery, Damien Hirst wanted to showcase his 3,000-piece art collection, nicknamed Murderme. For the newest exhibition at the space, titled “True Colours: Helen Beard/Sadie Laska/Boo Saville,” the artist added another 21 works to his holdings, commissioning three emerging artists to make new paintings for the occasion.
In preparation for the show, Hirst invited Saville and Beard to work in his studios in Gloucester and Peckham. This afforded both artists the opportunity to make their biggest works to date.
“I’ve wanted to work bigger for ages but there are challenges with working at that scale. Lots of those challenges are practical ones and you need a certain level of infrastructure to make it possible,” Saville told The Art Newspaper. “Damien has been an amazingly kind mentor.”
In previous Newport Street exhibitions, Hirst has included new works by Dan Colen and Rachel Howard, but “True Colours” represents a new direction focused on fostering the careers of young, up-and-coming artists.
The three artists are united by their embrace of color, from Saville’s color field canvases to Laska’s collages featuring found objects and Beard’s rainbow-colored canvases depicting sexual encounters from pornography.
“Sex in the media is full of shame right now, and it’s pretty much always from the perspective of the male gaze. So, we’re concentrating on men like Weinstein and their warped ideas about sex, the way it’s used, the power that men like that have had over women, and it ends up taking away from the beautiful thing that sex can be,” said Beard in an interview for the exhibition catalogue. “I would like to celebrate sex from my point of view. There’s no shame in that, a woman who is centering her work on that.”
June 6, 2018
