Love, Sex, and Drugs reinterprets Damien Hirst's iconic Spot paintings through an examination of human chemistry, replacing his clinical circles with uniformly-spaced hearts. Each piece in this thousand-work series is titled after a different drug compound, creating a systematic catalog of substances that alter our emotional and physical states.
The works maintain mathematical precision – each heart is identical in size and equidistant from its neighbors – while exploring a spectrum of colors that never repeat within a single composition. This systematic grid of hearts creates a striking tension between emotional symbolism and pharmaceutical categorization, between the clinical nature of drug compounds and the raw human experiences they induce.
Through these interconnected grids of hearts, the work explores love, sex, and drugs as fundamental human experiences – each chemical, whether naturally produced by the body or artificially introduced, shapes our consciousness, connections, and perceptions. The result is both a homage to and subversion of Hirst's pharmaceutical aesthetic, transforming his clinical framework into a meditation on the core experiences that define human existence.
