Damien Hirst - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Saturday, June 28, 2008 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Provenance

    White Cube, London; Galerie Bruno Brunnet, Berlin; Private Collection

  • Literature

    D. Hirst and R. Violette, ed., I want to spend the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always, forever, now, London, 1997, p. 221 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    Medicine and drugs are recurring themes in Hirst's work as means of altering perception and providing a short-lived cure, ineffectual in the face of death.  With its clinical and authoritative atmosphere, made cheerful by the contents of the cabinet, Hirst fuses the laboratory or hospital (the source and location of modern medicine) with the museum or gallery space. For Hirst medicine, like art, provides a belief system which is both seductive and illusory.
     
    “Where did you get the idea for these glass boxes?
    I have always loved Bacon paintings and stuff.  I have always loved glass as being something dangerous and something to keep you away.  You can see through it but it is solid.  I have always loved that kind of idea.  I had the glass on the Medicine Cabinets.  I loved that, using glass in a way that it is not a picture frame.  Then I just wanted to make an art work that was about something important…” (D. Hirst in conversation with M. d’Argenzio, ‘Bodies in Motion’ in Damien Hirst, Naples, 2004, p. 70)

  • Artist Biography

    Damien Hirst

    British • 1965

    There is no other contemporary artist as maverick to the art market as Damien Hirst. Foremost among the Young British Artists (YBAs), a group of provocative artists who graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London in the late 1980s, Hirst ascended to stardom by making objects that shocked and appalled, and that possessed conceptual depth in both profound and prankish ways.

    Regarded as Britain's most notorious living artist, Hirst has studded human skulls in diamonds and submerged sharks, sheep and other dead animals in custom vitrines of formaldehyde. In tandem with Cheyenne Westphal, now Chairman of Phillips, Hirst controversially staged an entire exhibition directly for auction with 2008's "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever," which collectively totalled £111 million ($198 million).

    Hirst remains genre-defying and creates everything from sculpture, prints, works on paper and paintings to installation and objects. Another of his most celebrated series, the 'Pill Cabinets' present rows of intricate pills, cast individually in metal, plaster and resin, in sterilized glass and steel containers; Phillips New York showed the largest of these pieces ever exhibited in the United States, The Void, 2000, in May 2017.

    View More Works

262

AAAAA

1992
Cardboard boxes, plastic and glass drug bottles, MDF, steel and glass.
76.2 x 101.6 x 22.9 cm (30 x 40 x 9 in).

Estimate
£450,000 - 550,000 ‡♠

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

29 June 2008, 5pm
London