Damien Hirst - Under the Influence New York Monday, March 9, 2009 | Phillips

Create your first list.

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

  • Provenance

    Other Criteria, London

  • Exhibited

    London, Zoo Art Fair 2007

  • Catalogue Essay

    At the end of the day you want to be remembered for noticing what was going on and trying to channel it in the right direction.  I want to be remembered for brightening people’s lives up.  First and foremost, the people around me at the time.  From the cradle to the grave, everything I ever experience I will guarantee can be transformed into a universal truth that will be meaningful to people on a much larger scale as long as I take my personality out of it and present it in a global…fashion.  We all feel like a dried-out cigarette now and again.  Everybody gets into dark holes.  And it’s always reassuring to find out you’re not the only one.  Always.
     
    D. Hirst, from an interview with G. Burn, On The Way To Work, London, 2002, p. 230

  • 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

28

Happy Head

2007
Gloss household paint on resin skull. 
7 x 4 1/2 x 6 1/8 in. (17.8 x 11.4 x 15.6 cm).
This work is uniquely number ten from a series of 20 Happy Heads.

Estimate
$60,000 - 80,000 

Sold for $80,500

Under the Influence

9 Mar 2009, 10am
New York