Damien Hirst

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

Damien Hirst and Robert Violette, Eds., I Want to Spend the Rest of my Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, London 1997, p. 244, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, alhthough the overall tonality is slightly warmer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Upon close inspection, there is some extremely light surface dirt running intermittently along all four extreme edges. There are three very faint and unobtrusive media accretions in the lower right hand quadrant. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

THREE IMPORTANT WORKS BY DAMIEN HIRST

Three Important Works by Damien Hirst from a Private London Collection are each extraordinary and early pieces representing the three iconic series, Spots, Medicine Cabinets and Butterfly Paintings that define Damien Hirst's oeuvre. Never seen before at auction, the three works were gifts from Hirst to the present owner. They illuminate Hirst's artistic vision and represent his career-long engagement with the traditionally antithetical precepts of science and art.

The Spots, Butterfly Paintings and Medicine Cabinets have underlying concepts which are often complex, but the vehicle used to carry them is characterised by an overriding freshness and vitality. Carbon Dioxide – from the celebrated series The Pharmaceutical Paintings - displays Hirst's examination of the formal possibilities of colour through the precise arrangement of candy coloured spots in a rigorous geometric system across a pristine white ground. No colour is ever repeated, and the spacing between each dot is perfectly equal. The uniformly circular shape and bright colouring of the spots are akin to the life giving pills of modern medicine, a fascination for Hirst that is further investigated in the medicine cabinet, Yikes.  

Captivated by the life sciences, with the medicine cabinet Yikes, Hirst presents an artistic shrine to this new religion. Rows of empty drug packaging are displayed in organised rows, appropriated like tins of Campbell's Soup, and arranged with the formal rigour and aesthetic unity of a Judd progression. Since the very beginning of his career, Hirst has expressed an interest in the theory of collection and display. Influenced by the Dadaist montages of Kurt Schwitters and Victorian 'curiosity cabinets', the drug packaging in Yikes seems to symbolise the futility of our desire to organise, classify and control the things fear most. Hirst questions our excessive trust in the death defying power of modern medicine, presenting the empty drug packaging as a contemporary memento mori to our own inevitable mortality.

The butterfly for Hirst holds considerable iconographic power and meaning. With the stunning Untitled, we are simultaneously faced with the spectacles of both death and artistic creation. By selecting lustrous natural materials – the butterflies and their wings - and amplifying their aesthetic impact through the sumptuous blue gloss ground, Hirst emboldens nature's rich tapestry. A panoply of different species – some large, some small, some brightly coloured, some chosen for their calming opalescence – seem fragile and painfully mortal, enshrined on the glistening surface. For Hirst, this spectacle contains the oxymoronic beauty of horror and horror of beauty. In a complex echo of the cyclical nature of life on earth, the delicate creature dies and in so doing, gives birth to a beautiful art object.

Each work from this extraordinary collection embodies the fundamental tenets which underpin Hirst's most important work. With interweaving themes of religion, death, science and art, Hirst creates three objects of mystical beauty which eloquently communicate the conceptual premises at the core of his entire oeuvre.

"In my head I had this idea of this artist who just endlessly made these paintings that were more like a logo. I did that. I just made that grid where I said all the gaps have to be the same as the spot and in no painting two colours are the same. It is just that every painting has got to be different. They just looked brilliant so I just carried on making them."

Damien HIrst: Exhibition Cataogue, Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Damien Hirst, 2004m p. 98