Exclusive: Potentially thousands of signed works from Currency series were mass-produced by artist’s team after 2016, sources say
Hirst produced 10,000 of the paintings, each comprising colourful hand-painted dots on A4 paper, as part of a project called The Currency that was born from the idea of creating a form of money from art.
The paintings were sold via a single authorised seller, Heni, run by Hirst’s business manager. It said at the time that the works were “created by hand in 2016”.However, five sources familiar with the creation of the works, including some of the painters who put the dots to paper, told the Guardian many of them were mass-produced in 2018 and 2019.
However, they denied Hirst had been deliberately misleading, arguing that it was his “usual practice” to date physical works in a conceptual art project with the date of the project’s conception, which in the case of The Currency was 2016. Lawyers for Hirst and Science said they always adhered to relevant health and safety rules and practices.
Do you have information about this story? Email [email protected], or use Signal or WhatsApp to message +44 7721 857348 In remarks in 2021, Hirst appeared to suggest 10,000 paintings was, for some reason, the optimal number for the project. After making a few hundred, he said, he realised he needed more. “I thought what if I made more than 500, what if I made, like, 1,000 or 5,000? So I made 5,000, and then we looked at it and we realised that 5,000 wasn’t enough, we have to make 10,000 in order to have enough to move around in that way.
However, that was not the approach Hirst adopted with two of the 10,000 paintings, images of which are available online. When the Guardian examined all 10,000 images, it discovered that while 9,998 were dated 2016, there were, curiously, two exceptions: a painting entitled 4778. It’s so heavenly, dated 2018, and another called 1321. I kept going up, which was given a 2021 date.
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