Damien Hirst

The present work from 1996 is Damien Hirst's first heart shaped 'Birthday' painting ever created.  Originally crafted as a gift for his friend Marco Pierre White, the celebrated London-based chef, whose famous restaurant Quo Vadis's walls were adorned with Hirst's art, Untitled is a magnificent example of elegant kitsch at its best. Following their much publicized falling out, White sold the painting at auction, an act which instigated the artist into replicating the concept of the Birthday paintings in smaller versions. 

Untitled reveals Hirst's earliest fascinations with butterflies as a medium and addresses themes of death and immortality.  Long interested in the tradition of the memento mori, Hirst here has taken it to new extremes.  Where in Dutch Old Master paintings an insect, generally a butterfly, was incorporated to indicate the transience of life and beauty, Hirst uses actual dead butterflies in his work.  Beautiful, with their glittering iridescent wings and exhibiting an array of colours against the otherwise monochromatic pink surface, it is simultaneously tragic to see these dead creatures trapped in the sticky ground of the paint.  As Hirst has remarked, "Then you get the beauty of the butterfly, but it is actually something horrible.  It is like a butterfly has flown around and died horribly in the paint.  The death of an insect that still has this really optimistic beauty of a wonderful thing.  I remember thinking about that.  They don't rot like humans" (Exhibition Catalogue, Naples, Museo Archeologico, Damien Hirst, 2004, p. 83). 

Hirst's interest in death is similar to his interest in love, a subject that is immediately evident through the kitsch of the heart-shaped canvas and frivolous sprinkling of butterflies of Untitled.  The heavily saturated sweet pink colour of the ground of the painting further enhances this candy-box effect.  Hirst therefore deceives his viewer, while presenting them with what seems a picture-perfect image of sentimentality, in reality he is presenting a large scale image of death itself.