DAMIEN HIRST | Lullaby in Blue

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although it fails to fully convey the iridescent qualities of some of the butterflies. Condition: This work is in very good and original condition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra violet light.
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Peppered with a cacophony of radiant butterflies Lullaby in Blue is an exquisite example of Damien Hirst’s iconic Butterfly Paintings. For Hirst, butterflies utterly embody the poignant beauty of life and death; though their lives are fleeting, their wings belie the passing of time and their vitality is preserved, even post-mortem. Poised in the stillness of death their fragility and tactility is both blissfully celebratory and poignantly sad. Reflective of his earliest iterations on the subject, the dramatic butterfly wings in the present work are scattered across a high gloss base of vibrant royal blue, which simultaneously evokes the subliminal colour fields of Mark Rothko and Ellsworth Kelly. As one of the most visually jubilant explorations of this subject, Lullaby in Blue seduces the viewer into existential contemplation as its jewel like protagonists highlight the subtle fragility and transience of life. Butterflies were one of the earliest sources of inspiration for Hirst, and have come to iconise his practice. Hirst first happened upon the idea of incorporating insects into his works by chance. As he recalled: “I remember painting something white once and flies landing on it, thinking ‘Fuck!’ but then thinking it was funny. This idea of an artist trying to make a monochrome and being fucked up by flies landing in the paint or something like that” (Damien Hirst cited in: Exh. Cat., Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Damien Hirst: The Agony and the Ecstasy, 2004, p. 83). Hirst subsequently went on to recreate this effect using butterflies: “I [wanted] it to look like an artist’s studio where he had wet coloured canvases and the butterflies had landed in them” (Ibid.). As a result, in 1991, Hirst implemented his career-launching In and Out of Love immersive piece in a travel agent’s in London. Black caterpillar pupae were embedded in the white paint of several canvases, with rows of potted flowers along their bases. The viewers' experienced the hatching of the butterflies, and their flying toward the flowers, as part of the work. The butterflies live metamorphosis from pupae to fully grown breeding adults effectively served as a miniature illustration of the complete cycle of life and death.

Indeed, the unique paradox of beauty in death is a resounding theme throughout Hirst's practice. His earliest and perhaps most iconic iteration of this is the tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde: The Phyiscal Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living from 1991. Furthermore, as a shocking antecedent to the picturesque butterflies of In and Out of Love, the 1990 installation A Thousand Years incorporated not just live flies but an Insect-O-Cutor and a severed cow’s head to create a dark spectacle of birth, death, and decay. However, above all, it is the remarkable ability of the butterfly to retain its physical beauty even in death that has provided a compelling and enduring source of artistic and emotive potency for Hirst. As he has emphatically explained: “Then you get the beauty of the butterfly… The death of an insect that still has this really optimistic beauty of a wonderful thing” (Ibid.). Similar, perhaps, to Jean Dubuffet who used butterfly wings in his 1950s assemblages based on the rural landscape of Vence, Hirst encourages the viewer to focus on the extraordinary – yet fragile – beauty of the natural world. Representing the very apotheosis of this formative concern, the painstakingly created Lullaby in Blue, although ostensibly morbid, nonetheless broadcasts a potent celebration of life.