Damien Hirst

Jay Jopling, London

Private Collection, Prato

Sale: Christie’s, London, Contemporary Art, 29 June 1999, Lot 148 

Private Collection, USA

Sale: Christie’s, New York, Post-War and Contemporary Art, 14 May 2009, Lot 366

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2009 

Gordon Burn and Damien Hirst, I want to spend the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always, forever, now, London 1997, p. 221, illustrated in colour

Exhibition Catalogue, New York, L&M Arts, Damien Hirst: The Complete Medicine Cabinets, 2010, p. 179

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate although the overall tonality is more saturated in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is evidence of minor and unobtrusive wear in places to the cabinet.
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Created in 1992, Untitled AAAAAAA forms part of Damien Hirst’s celebrated medicine cabinets series, which have become icons of the artist’s oeuvre. In its carefully selected assortment of pills, mixtures and medicine packets enclosed within three shelves, Untitled AAAAAAA signifies the progression of existence itself, presenting the ‘tools’ required to maintain a long and healthy life. Furthermore, Untitled AAAAAAA and the other medicine cabinets channel a Pop Art ideal in their presentation of quotidian commercial goods: re-imagining a consumer commodity as art most recently emphasised in the work of Jeff Koons. Arthur C. Danto has articulated this concept with reference to the medicine cabinets: “Damien Hirst’s medicine cabinets series, projects a certain, latter-day Pop Art aesthetic – colourful, brash, and familiar to a community of consumers – and at the same time it connects with the artist’s philosophical preoccupations with birth and death, as well as with his deep belief that art heals” (Arthur C. Danto, ‘Damien Hirst’s Medicine Cabinets: Art, Death, Sex, Society and Drugs’ in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, L&M Arts, Damien Hirst: The Complete Medicine Cabinets, 2010, p. 5).

The theme of the medicine cabinet has preoccupied Hirst since the very beginning of his stellar career. The first two medicine cabinets, Sinner (1988) and Enemy (1988-89) were created using medicine packets and bottles which had belonged to the artist’s grandmother: Hirst was so pleased with the results that he chose to create a further twelve medicine cabinets shortly afterwards with each work named after a track from the 1977 Sex Pistol’s album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, four examples of which were exhibited for his degree show at Goldsmith’s College of Art in 1989. In a recent interview Hirst recalled that his early medicine cabinets were the first works he was truly satisfied with: “It just looked invincible, and it sort of didn’t have me in there – I wasn’t part of it. I’d seen Jeff Koons’ hoovers, and that was what got me to do the medicine cabinets… I’d hidden myself, in a way, which was the thing that I needed to do” (Damien Hirst in conversation with Nicholas Serota in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Modern, Damien Hirst, 2012, pp. 93-94).

Untitled AAAAAAA, along with the other works in the series, combines two of Hirst’s key interests and abiding areas of investigation: science and mortality. The very presence of the serried ranks of medicine bottles, creams and pills hints at the fragility of the human body, whilst acting as a concomitant paean to the remarkable medical advances of the Twentieth Century. The darker connotations suggested by Hirst's medicine cabinets are thus alleviated by the inherent presence of hope and the possibility of being able to mitigate pain and suffering: full of items that have the potential to heal, the simple medicine cabinet is here imbued with life-changing qualities. Untitled AAAAAAA thus becomes an almost magical repository of seeming immortality.

Hirst remembers a moment in a pharmacy with his mother, picking up on the trusting faith that people invest in the power of pills and other modern medical inventions to cure all ills, an all-encompassing panacea: “I’d been trying to explain loads of work to my mum, about what I’d been doing. She’s an open-minded person, but she had a completely closed mind about it… And I was with my mum in the chemist: she was getting a prescription, and it was, like, complete trust on the one level in something she’s equally in the dark about… It’s just completely packaging and formal sculpture and organised shapes. My mum was looking at the same kind of stuff in the chemist’s and believing in it completely. And then, when looking at it in an art gallery, completely not believing in it. As far as I could see, it was the same thing… I really loved the idea of art maybe, you know, curing people” (Damien Hirst quoted in: Gordon Burn and Damien Hirst, On the Way to Work, London 2001, p. 25). An exposition of Hirst’s career-long interest in the cycle of life, Untitled AAAAAAA is a potent signifier of humanity’s inherent hope in the possibilities of future immortality attained through the wonders of scientific advancement.