Damien Hirst - Under the Influence New York Monday, March 31, 2008 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Gagosian Gallery, New York

  • Catalogue Essay


    “...subtle, ice-cream-ish, yikes, gosh, with pinks (with rosy-orange centre) fleshy, spinning, expansive, MTV, rotating, atomic, helixical, elixia, whizzing, hurtling, void, inspiration, chaotic, psychotic, madman’s crazy, psychopathic, schizoid, murder..."
    D. Hirst, I want to Spend the Rest of my Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, London: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 1996, n.p.
    If a pyrotechnic means might be expected, considering the artist of the present lot undertaking an exploration of the methodology of painting, the present lot does not dissapoint. As opposed to the measured clinicality of works from the “Spot” series, which the artist has referred to as “sculptures of paintings,” the “Spins” are lush, organic, and violent.This is a dichotomy visible in Hirst’s sculptures, as well, if one considers the brutal industrial perfection of the machined objects they are so often composed of in contrast to their fleshy components and counterparts of taxidermy and viscera.The artist’s inclination to encompass as broad a spectrum of visual suggestiveness and metaphorical ideology possible is perhaps best expressed in his own words on the “Spin” paintings, of which only a small excerpt is reproduced above.
         

  • 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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26

Beautiful Guests Must Dress In Pastel Only for the Pictures Painting

2007
Gloss household paint on canvas.
60 in. (152.4 cm) diameter.

Estimate
$500,000 - 700,000 

Under the Influence

31 Mar 2008, 10am & 2pm
New York