On 11th November, White Cube São Paolo will unveil a collection of paintings from Hirst's latest series, the 'Black Scalpel Cityscapes'. Described by the artist as ‘portraits of living cities’, the paintings are made up of vast numbers of surgical instruments that combine to create bird’s-eye views of urbanised areas from around the world.

With the series, Hirst investigates subjects pertaining to the sometimes-disquieting realities of modern life – surveillance, urbanisation, globalisation and the virtual nature of conflict – as well as elements relating to the universal human condition, such as our inability to arrest physical decay. Manmade features and natural elements such as buildings, rivers and roads are depicted in scalpels as well as razor blades, hooks, iron filings and safety-pins, all set against black backgrounds. The 17 cities included in White Cube's exhibition are either sites of recent conflict, cities relating to the artist's own life, or centres of economic, political or religious significance and includes Washington; Rome and the Vatican City; Leeds (where the artist grew up); Beijing; Moscow; New York; and London. Each city’s particular history is written into its geographical spread, showing how it has incrementally grown and developed over the years.

The ‘Black Scalpel Cityscapes’ make reference to the military procedure of ‘surgical bombing’ or ‘surgical strikes’ – commonly used in modern warfare – which aims to limit collateral damage by targeting precise areas for destruction. The suggestion of a remote, digital conflict inevitably reduces the devastating realities of war. In a similarly misleading manner, the perspective of an aerial map minimises the life beneath it to a series of detached systems and patterns of collective existence; recalling the imagery used in the films Powers of Ten (1968, 1977) by Charles and Ray Eames, as well as the compressed, slow motion, time-lapse footage of US towns in Godfrey Reggio’s cult film Koyaanisqatsi (1982). Hirst’s paintings, therefore, make inevitable allusions to the all-seeing eye, that of surveillance tools such as Google Earth, now used by approximately half a billion people and whose roots are traceable to a 3D mapping application used by US military during the Iraq War.

Hirst has described the steel scalpels, which have recurred in his work since the early ‘90s, as ‘dark but at the same time light’, a reference to the visual appeal of the highly reflective, precision-tooled metal, and the universal fear of the surgeon’s knife. Playing on elements of wordplay surrounding ‘surgical strikes’, Hirst here uses them to dissect not only individual concerns over mortality, but the deep-rooted, society-wide anxieties over surveillance, the digitisation of warfare and the sense of a remote Orwellian order and its imposition on our individuality.