Damien Hirst - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, May 15, 2008 | Phillips

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  • Provenance


    Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles

  • Catalogue Essay


    The part of Damien’s Brixton studio dedicated to making “beautiful” spinning paintings is a possibly-unwitting- parody of this kind of purist ethos: floor and walls and furniture awash in angsty, painterly looking paint. The atmosphere in which the paintings are created- less wordsworthian emotion recollected in tranquility than kindergarten splatter fight- is reflected in [his] titles… “Art seems to me to be about life” is probably Damien’s fundamental statement. “If art wasn’t around we’d still have life but if life wasn’t here you could forget about the art, so I find it difficult to believe in the art,” he has said. “On the one hand I want to be an artist and on the other I want to be realistic. There’s a clash somewhere and a feeling in me that I can’t override; the more I try to escape it, the more deviously it evades me, it’s an inescapable solution. If I follow my ideas about art through to their final conclusion I realize I shouldn’t make art, but I still do. G. Burn, “Is Mr. Death In,” I want to spend the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always, forever, now, London, 1997, p. 11

  • 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

120

Beautiful Dirvish Spin Me Round on the Ground Painting

2006

Gloss household paint on canvas.

Diameter: 72 in. (182.8 cm).

Signed and dated “Damien Hirst 2007” on the reverse; signed “D. Hirst” on the stretcher bar.

Estimate
$600,000 - 800,000 

Sold for $541,000

Contemporary Art Part I

15 May 2008, 7pm
New York