Damien Hirst

Gagosian Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2007

Los Angeles, Gagosian Gallery, Superstition, 2007, p. 135, illustrated in colour and p. 166, illustrated in installation view

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the illustration fails to convey the iridescent and reflective quality of the blue and green butterfly wings, and the red tends more towards a deep fuschia hue in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition.
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With its kaleidoscopic colours and pseudo religious glow, Homage to a Government, The Dwelling Place, 2006, is one of the butterfly-wing paintings exhibited at Damien Hirst's critically acclaimed show 'Superstition'. Each work in the exhibition takes its inspiration and title from a poem by the British poet Philip Larkin, from his most celebrated and final volume of poems entitled 'High Windows'. Larkin, a young man during the war years, wrote poetry fraught with intimations of mortality and the inevitability of death. In his paintings, Hirst revisits Larkin's leitmotif, through his trademark use of the fragile, colourful butterfly wings orchestrated into complex designs that are based on the hallowed stained-glass windows of Catholic churches.  

 

Set into a paint film of deep fuchsia gloss, the naturally saturated, exuberant hues of the butterflies' gossamer wings – iridescent and reflecting light – are so mesmerising that standing before this seven-foot masterpiece is analogous to the reverence-inspiring experience of standing below the great Gothic rose stained-glass window set into the front façade of Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris. A historic art form dating back to before medieval times, stained glass windows were used to tell stories from the bible and the lives of the saints. Used as a tool for focusing and to help establish a sacred space, the great stained-glass rose windows were designed to induce awe. In the same way, Homage to a Government stuns the viewer into contemplation.

 

Due to the complex composition, its appearance changes when viewed from different distances and perspectives. From afar, the individual wings resemble jewel-like tesserae in a mosaic, brimming with turquoise, azurite, amber and yellow sapphires, each intense colour subservient to the chromatic design of the overarching principle. The blue butterflies, with iridescent wings as rich in hue as lapis-lazuli, reflect the light to such a degree that the surface scintillates and shimmers. Up close, instead of the lives of the saints, it is the individual specimens that become discernible. A panoply of different species – some large some small, some brightly coloured, others mottled – their fragile existence and brief lifespan suddenly become poignant in their enshrinement in household gloss. For Hirst, this moment of realisation contains the oxymoronic beauty of horror, and horror of beauty. In a complex metaphor, the caterpillar dies in its chrysalis, and is reborn as a butterfly. This delicate creature dies, but in doing so gives birth to a beautiful object, the work of art. As ever in Hirst's work, beauty is laced with death.

 

Like a view into a kaleidoscope, Homage to a Government presents us with a simultaneity of order and chaos, a composition which from some viewpoints has a discernible structure but from others fractures into a complex matrix of colour. The rose window structure of the composition, which represents religion's attempt to contain the order of unfathomable existence, is also a recurring pattern found throughout nature, seen in biology, geology, chemistry, physics and astronomy, from the macro to micro, from planets to atoms and our very DNA. In Homage to a Government, Hirst layers and holds in tension these conflicting scientific and religious perspectives. Although a scientific world view can give us knowledge of the nature of things – it can verify and prove the facts – it cannot tell us what these mean. Conversely religion, with its attendant moral interpretations, unproven if not unfounded, can grant the world meaning and human beings value. In the present work, Hirst recasts religious themes and in doing so, he brings art into the equation and raises the question of whether art can be an antidote to the nihilistic experience of living in an uncertain world. By referencing Larkin's poem, which deals which the folly of war, he also points out the futility of wars taking place at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

 

In interweaving religion, science and art, distinct categories each with its own fervent claim to truth, Hirst creates an object of bewildering beauty which eloquently communicates the conceptual premises at the core of his entire oeuvre. Like a stained glass window, Homage to a Government reminds us of our relation to the infinite and shimmers with the promise of a life beyond. Yet on closer scrutiny, the preserved dead butterflies remind us of the inevitability of the cycle of life and the certainty of death, the prosaic manifest reality of the biological sciences.