Damien Hirst's Beautiful Iridescent for Mike Painting, executed in 2002, stands as a radiant testament to the artist’s innovative engagement with the principles of chance and motion, exemplifying the iconic and process-oriented nature of his celebrated Spin Paintings. This work, a veritable symphony of colour in motion, captures the viewer's gaze with a hypnotic immediacy, as an effulgent explosion of hues – scarlet reds, regal violets, tender pinks, and celestial blues – emanates from the very heart of the canvas. The centrifugal force at play imparts a dynamic energy, propelling these vivid streams of colour outward, creating the compelling illusion of a vortex that anchors the composition within a realm of perpetual movement and metamorphosis.

Hirst's Spin Paintings are conceived through a method both elementary and profound: from atop a ladder, the artist applies household emulsion paints to a canvas mounted on a spinning machine, allowing the relentless motion to scatter and disperse the pigments into intricate, unpredictable patterns. This process, in which the artist consciously relinquishes control, yields a final composition that is at once mesmerising and chaotic, exploring binary oppositions of order and disorder, control and abandon. In Beautiful Iridescent for Mike Painting, the hand of the artist is removed from the final product, subsumed by the mechanical forces at work, thus achieving a purity of expression that distils the very essence of abstraction.

The genesis of Hirst's Spin Paintings can be traced back to 1992 in his Brixton studio, a period marked by creative collaboration with Angus Fairhurst. During the art fair 'A Fete Worse Than Death' in Shoreditch, London, dressed in clownish garb by the performance artist Leigh Bowery, Hirst and Fairhurst invited passers-by to create their own spin paintings for the modest fee of one pound – an act that blurred the boundaries between artist and audience, creation and commodity. Hirst's fascination with the spin technique is rooted in childhood memories, specifically a 1975 episode of the beloved British children’s programme Blue Peter. By 1994, whilst residing in Berlin, he had constructed his own spin machine, marking the beginning of a prolific period in which these kinetic creations became a central facet of his oeuvre.

In his Spin Paintings, Hirst draws upon the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, whose experiments with rotating discs produced mesmerising optical effects, yet Hirst imbues these explorations with a distinctly expressionistic drive. By rejecting manual intervention, Hirst engages in a conceptual dialogue with Duchamp’s provocative readymades, challenging entrenched notions of authorship and authenticity. There is an implicit conversation with Jackson Pollock, the abstract expressionist paragon, whose action paintings epitomised personal creative expression. Hirst diverges from Pollock’s sacrosanct emphasis on the artist’s 'trace,' instead opting for a method that subverts the very notion of the artist’s presence within the work.

Beautiful Iridescent for Mike Painting represents a significant departure from Hirst’s earlier explorations, such as the rigid structure of his Spot Paintings or the existential meditations on mortality encapsulated in his formaldehyde series. Here, the viewer is enveloped by a radiant stratum of colour, each hue pulsating with a life of its own, evoking the inherent unpredictability and vibrancy of existence. This work encapsulates a moment where the fundamental forces of gravity and motion supersede the artist’s intentionality, resulting in a composition that is as much a celebration of life’s capricious beauty as it is a meditation on the relinquishment of control.

The title of the work, with its inclusion of the word ‘beautiful,’ resonates with the euphoria and exuberance visually manifested in the kaleidoscopic cascade of colours that animate the canvas. Both title and composition are a paean to the power of painting and the infinite possibilities it harbours, distilled to their most elemental form through Hirst’s deliberate removal of the artist’s hand, allowing the medium itself to dictate the terms of its expression.