Damien Hirst

White Cube, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

"The grid and the landscape will never fuse together, although it is a very neat and clean thing to do. It is also like putting a frame around something which isolates the object in itself and separates it from everything else." (Damien Hirst, I want to spend the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always, forever, now, London 1997, p. 250)

One of an extremely rare series of three cabinets which Damien Hirst executed in 1993, We've got Style (The Vessel Collection - Pink) was made during the same year in which he introduced arguably his most important work, Mother and Child, Divided, to the international art scene at the Venice Biennale. It was the year after his breakthrough exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery featuring A Thousand Years and The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Undoubtedly his most creatively fruitful period, a wide variety of pieces were debuted which became the matrix for most of the works which followed in subsequent years.

The Vessel Collection series has its heritage in an early experience Damien Hirst had with his next door neighbour, Mr. Barnes, during a two year interval between school and art college. An elderly man with whom Hirst had a passing acquaintance, he could be seen daily wandering around the neighbourhood and returning home in the evening with objects he had collected. When he apparently disappeared, Hirst decided to find out what had happened and what he found over the fence was an incredible installation. Barnes himself had sadly passed away, but he had left behind an astonishing legacy of rooms packed to the ceiling with objects he had amassed. The age and state of the materials, their overlaid histories and the way that they were arranged architecturally became a kind of monument to the man, a document of existence.

This experience had a profound effect on him and as he studied Schwitters and Cornell, Hirst became fundamentally aware of the historical, philosophical and symbolic power of ordinary objects and their placement in juxtaposition. He began by collaging found materials from Barnes' house and in turn these compositions of objects and colours gave birth to two different but highly important strands in his works, the Spot paintings and Medicine Cabinets. Both of these sets of works posited the idea of formal arrangements of colour and ready-made objects as lexicons of our existence with the obvious reference to pharmacy as a way of sustaining life.

The Vessel Collection looks at the other ways that we sustain life, through the formalised eating and drinking ceremonies and the objects that we have created around this social construct. With its formal heritage in the Medicine Cabinets and its chromatic heritage in the Spots, the present work immediately arrests the senses with its epic scale and gorgeous structured arrangements of colour and form. Hirst has here collected various different styles of feeding and drinking vessels and removed their function in place of purely formal concerns. Purposefully out-dated and retro in style, the objects which Hirst has chosen are, to all functional purposes, dead, a reliquary to another time. Much like the associated work from 1991 which is now in the Tate collection, London, Forms without Life, a collection of shells sit as fossils to a former existence, yet through their re-arrangement and presentation they also celebrate the eternal beauty of life. On a ground of pastel pink, the softened, hushed tones of baby blue and peppermint green sing, as does the odd interjection of other decorative arrangements such as stripes. The grid-like arrangement, the landscape format and the Minimalist presentation all have strong art historical ties and there is no doubting the aesthetic power, but what Hirst adds is an incredible ability to draw devastating meaning from the simple re-presentation and packaging of objects.