British art star Damien Hirst, whose interests have previously included bedazzling human skulls with platinum and diamonds, putting tiger sharks in formaldehyde, and being the U.K.'s richest living artist, has now added urban topography to his repertoire. Hirst just debuted a painting series called "Black Scalpel Cityscapes" at White Cube Gallery in São Paolo, Brazil, which features surgical instruments arranged as bird's-eye map views of 17 cities, including Moscow, New York, Beijing, and Vatican City.
Scalpels, razor blades, safety pins, and hooks are used to show buildings, roads, and rivers. The artists asserts that his new series addresses themes of surveillance, and tools like Google Earth, the ubiquitous mapping application whose roots, he says, are traceable to a 3D mapping tool used during the Iraq war by the American military.
According to White Cube Gallery, the British shock artist uses surgical tools in his work to "dissect" not only the "deep-rooted, society-wide anxieties over surveillance" and "the digitization of warfare," but also "the sense of a remote Orwellian order and its imposition on our individuality." Photos, below:
· Damien Hirst Composes Black Scalpel Cityscapes from Surgical Tools [Design Boom]
· All Mind Blowing posts [Curbed National]
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