Damien Hirst - 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale London Monday, June 27, 2016 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Private Collection

  • Catalogue Essay

    'I really like making them. And I really like the machine, and I really like the movement.' DAMIEN HIRST

    Initially one might perceive Hirst’s spin paintings to be the antithesis to his infamously geometric spot paintings or grid based butterfly windows. The chance and spontaneity involved in pouring paint over a rotating canvas, feels far removed from regimented spots of paint. However, the mechanics of the spin series are characterised by a process based approach, which alleviates the artist’s hand from the final outcome. Thus, these works are embedded with Hirst’s formulaic way of working and maintain continuity in relation to these aforementioned bodies of work. Having experimented with this technique in the early nighties, while based in Brixton, Hirst’s spins have become a consistent fragment the artist’s production.

    From the observers perspective, the creation of the Hirst spins are an interesting consideration of a personal routine or ritual; each work carries the spontaneity of colour, dependant on the artist’s impulse, lending it a unique conveyance from canvas back to the instantaneous moment of creation. In this sense, the present lot forms part of an evolving series of biography.

  • 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.

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148

Beautiful Catequil Negativism Painting for Nick (with Diamonds)

2011
cubic zirconia and household gloss on canvas
diameter: 121.9 cm (48 in.)

Estimate
£120,000 - 180,000 

Sold for £209,000

Contact Specialist
Henry Highley
Head of Sale
+ 44 20 7318 4061

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale

London Auction 28 June 2016