Damien Hirst

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

 

Damien Hirst and Gordon Burn, I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now., London 1997, p. 323, illustrated in colour
Exhibition Catalogue, London, White Cube, Romance in the Age of Uncertainty, 2003, p. 65 and pp. 72-3, illustration of another version in colour
Exhibition Catalogue, Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Damien Hirst: The Agony and the Ecstasy Selected Works from 1989-2004, 2004-05, p. 218, installation photograph of another version in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality of the flesh is lighter and pinker in the original. Condition: This work is in very good and original condition.
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"That whole idea of religion today, it is beheaded. It doesn't quite function. There is something missing... it has got problems. I think the head in the tank was a way to visualise that problem.”

The artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Damien Hirst, 2004, p. 221


Beheaded, flayed and immortalised in formaldehyde, Damien Hirst's Thomas is a true spectacle of the sacred and profane. Named after Saint Thomas the Apostle, or Doubting Thomas, famous for demanding to touch Christ’s wounds before being convinced of his resurrection, the present work belongs to the pioneering cycle of vitrines collectively entitled The Twelve Disciples, all of which contain decapitated and skinned bulls' heads. Inaugurated alongside a further eleven preserved heads to complete the eponymous religious ensemble, this extraordinary corpus iconoclastically unravels the tautology and iconography of Christianity. An entire saintly pantheon of martyrdom and sacrifice is here butchered and irreverently recapitulated with the clinical semblance of the dissecting table and the autopsy room. Executed in 1994 this early sculpture belongs to Hirst's paradigmatic Natural History corpus; the infamous “zoo of dead animals” that together canonically encompasses the dissected cows, Some Comfort Gained from the Inherent Lies in Everything (1996); preserved lambs, Away from the Flock (1994); and the pickled shark of Hirst's colossal magnum opus, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991). Industrially encased in the thick white parameters of Hirst's signature glass vitrine, Thomas is situated alongside these emblematical early works in both date and iconic status. Exhibiting unrivalled physical brutality with the cool detachment of a scientific specimen, this unique work gives unrelenting expression to the disenchantment of modernity, a martyr for the spiritually forsaken contemporary moment: "The cows' heads appear sacrificial: the life of an animal substituted for the life of an individual" (Annushka Shani, 'Between fact and wonder: Damien Hirst's new religious works', Exhibition Catalogue, London, White Cube, Romance in the Age of Uncertainty, 2003, p. 9).

If death is the supreme arbiter of Hirst's artistic production, then science, religion and art represent the holy trinity. The extraordinary confluence of Hirst's Catholic upbringing and weekends spent working at a local mortuary have undoubtedly channelled an idiosyncratic visual double-speak that unites the polarity of religion and science to forge some of Hirst's most challenging and iconographically rich works to date. Belonging to the very incipit of this engagement, Thomas is remarkably prophetic of Hirst's later praxis and increasing preoccupation with this powerful dual vernacular. 

Within the cycle of Twelve Disciples, Hirst's morbidly categorical impetus to "understand the world by taking things out of the world... you kill things to look at them" is coupled with the familiar fables of Christ's followers (Damien Hirst, I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, London 1997, p. 7). Hirst explains: "they are great stories and it is about the ends of those guys. Cut just like a group of people who all met these terrible ends... Everyone is a martyr really in life. So I think you can use that as an example of your own life, just that kind of involvement with the world. Just trying to find out what your life actually amounts to, in the end" (the artist in: Exhibition Catalogue, Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Damien Hirst, 2004, p. 223). Designated saintly names, Hirst's bovine Apostles are embodied stand-ins for human sacrifice. Recalling Roman Catholic transubstantiation, the miraculous transformation of the Eucharistic wine and bread into the physical body of Christ, Hirst requires physical authenticity for his work: "I couldn't say what I wanted with a painting or with a photograph of an object. I wanted the real thing" (Damien Hirst, I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, Op. cit., p. 299). Redolent within the abjectly peeled physiognomy of Thomas, secular death is unadorned and mortality is desublimated as meat preserved for scientific specimen. Though death undoubtedly prevails, both science and religion stake discordant claims to the promise of eternal life within Hirst's decapitated bull's head.

Ever since the earliest Medicine Cabinets from 1989, Hirst has heralded science and pharmacology as the new cathedral for our contemporary age. By comingling Roman Catholic spiritual mysticism with the life-giving empirical claims of scientific advancement, Hirst's brutally skinned emblems of Christian sacrifice incite a metaphorically complex and physically challenging dialogue with the terms of our modern day existence. Submerged in formaldehyde, Thomas is suspended in a chemical utopia, frozen in the purgatorial space between the moment of expiration and utter oblivion: flesh and tissue are unnaturally fixed while life and death congeal in perverse stasis. Prohibited from natural decomposition, Thomas is baptised by full-immersion in the toxic aqua vitae that suspends putrefaction. Herein, the fragility and transience of life is framed and objectified.

Hirst tragically re-accustoms the viewer with the truth of the cow as slaughtered meat, an acknowledgement of banality that in turn stimulates an intensely emotive visual identification with moribund corporeality. With Thomas and the extraordinary Natural History corpus, Hirst engenders a new realism: utterly concrete, physical and direct, these works powerfully confront an inescapable reminder of the impermanence of our own physical machinery. In Hirst's own words: "I want to give you the energy to go way and think about your life again" (the artist in: Exhibition Catalogue, Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Op. cit., p. 236).