Blain|Southern presents a survey of works on paper by Lucian Freud (b.1922 – 2011). Beginning in the 1940s and spanning the artist’s career, Lucian Freud: Drawings brings together more than 100 works, many of which have never been shown in public before.

Curator William Feaver, who presented Freud’s acclaimed retrospectives at Tate Britain, London (2002) and the Museo Correr,Venice(2005),worked closely with the artist on this exhibition for the last five years, until his death in July 2011.

The works range from the intimate, including portraits of his mother and father, his children and close friends - among them the painter Francis Bacon - to landscapes and studies of animals. Etchings, watercolours, gouaches and works rendered in chalk, charcoal, pastel, conté, and pen and ink, are to be interspersed with oil paintings, constantly interrelating.

Lucian Freud was born in Berlin in 1922, and died in England, July 2011. He held the Ordre du Mérite and the Order of the Companions of Honour. Recent solo exhibitions include: Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010); Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (2008); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008); and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2007).

Lucian Freud: Drawings has been co-organised with Acquavella Galleries, New York, and coincides with a major retrospective of Freud’s paintings at the National Portrait Gallery, London, curated by Sarah Howgate, which will then travel to Fort Worth, Texas, 2 July – 28 October 2012.

Gagosian Gallery presents The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011 by Damien Hirst.

The exhibition takes place at once across all of Gagosian Gallery’s eleven locations in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Rome, Athens, Geneva, and Hong Kong, opening worldwide on January 12, 2012. Most of the paintings are being lent by private individuals and public institutions, more than 150 different lenders from twenty countries. Conceived as a single exhibition in multiple locations, “The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011” makes use of this demographic fact to determine the content of each exhibition according to locality.

Included in the exhibition are more than 300 paintings, from the first spot on board that Hirst created in 1986; to the smallest spot painting comprising half a spot and measuring 1 x 1/2 inch (1996); to a monumental work comprising only four spots, each 60 inches in diameter; and up to the most recent spot painting completed in 2011 containing 25,781 spots that are each 1 millimeter in diameter, with no single color ever repeated.


I was always a colorist, I’ve always had a phenomenal love of color… I mean, I just move color around on its own. So that’s where the spot paintings came from—to create that structure to do those colors, and do nothing. I suddenly got what I wanted. It was just a way of pinning down the joy of color.

—Damien Hirst