Will Damien Hirst’s Unpopular Paintings Conquer Austria?

When Damien Hirst first showed his “return to painting” at the Wallace Collection in London in 2009, critics had a field day: the FT called the works “predictable” while the  Independent wrote they were “not worth looking at.”

Now these, and other pictures painted by Hirst himself (a rare occurrence in the artist’s practice) are heading to the Arnulf Rainer Museum in Baden, Austria, where they’ll be exhibited alongside some of Rainer’s expressionist paintings from the early 1950s. The exhibition opens on April 25, 2014. Whether or not the Austrian critics are more forgiving remains to be seen.