The Virtues, Justice

Blossoms crowd almost the entire canvas here, built up from thousands of separate dabs of thick paint, pink and white and the odd stab of green or lilac, all set against a blue so bright it looks like a spring sky at noon. Damien Hirst made this as part of his Cherry Blossoms series, worked on between 2018 and 2020, and it belongs to a smaller group of eight paintings called The Virtues, each named after one of the values of the samurai code of Bushido. This one is Justice, or Gi. The others include Courage, Mercy, Loyalty and Honesty. Hirst showed them in Tokyo in 2021, and they were also among the first works he released as digital editions.

Hirst is best known for very different things: a shark suspended in formaldehyde, a diamond-covered skull, grids of coloured spots painted by assistants. So a room full of flowering trees came as a surprise to many people. He was blunt about it, calling the paintings garish and messy and fragile, and said he liked how ridiculous it felt to paint something as pretty as blossom. Underneath the prettiness sits the same subject he has circled for decades, which is that beautiful things do not last. Cherry blossom is famous in Japan for exactly that reason, flowering for a week or two and then gone. Worth noticing the drips running down the blue in the lower left corner, where the paint was flung on wet and simply allowed to slide.