Damien Hirst’s Reconciliation, 2018, is a hypnotic example of the artist’s most recent series of large-scale butterfly works. The wings of butterflies are set in meticulous, concentric circles, with a Hebomoia Glaucippe butterfly at the very center, functioning as a point of visual focus.i The round, uniform composition of the work has a soothing, even spiritual effect, reminiscent of the mandala, an intricate, stylized representation of the divinely-ordered cosmos common to Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Shinto religious traditions. The eye moves around Reconciliation like a penitent Catholic walks a prayer labyrinth, a concentric path for contemplation, found in the gardens of Catholic monasteries, or paved into the stones of cathedral floors.
“I was a Catholic until I was 12… I loved the imagery.”
—Damien Hirst
Hirst’s deployment of Catholic references in his works strongly correlates with his use of butterflies as art materials. While his first solo exhibition, In and Out of Love, 1991, featured live butterflies, it wasn’t until the early 2000s, with his Kaleidoscope series (2001-present), that Hirst began using butterfly wings in earnest as a medium.ii In the mid-2000s, he executed a series of 150 concentric butterfly works, smaller in scale than Reconciliation, with each work taking its title from an entry in the Book of Psalms in the Bible. The Cathedrals series, begun c. 2007, draws a direct link to perhaps the strongest Catholic visual reference for Hirst’s butterflies: the stained-glass windows of Catholic cathedrals. Hirst recently brought this connection to its apex with a stained-glass skylight of butterflies for Claridge’s, London, in 2022.
In the Middle Ages, architects worked to incorporate increasingly large stained-glass windows into the walls of cathedrals; the rose window, a concentric masterpiece of stained glass, was one such innovation of design. Rose windows were meant to inspire awe in the medieval Christian worshipper; as believers prayed in the cathedral, the divine effect of sunlight shining through stained glass heightened the emotional impact of their devotional experiences. Reconciliation, which invokes the jewel tones of a rose window, such as those seen at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, is named for one of the Catholic sacraments that believers participate in at Church. The sacrament of Reconciliation, usually begun in childhood, is a ritual in which the believer confesses their sins to a priest, who forgives them, and gives them penance. Reconciliation is a foundational sacrament for Catholics, as God’s forgiveness saves them from Hell. Raised Catholic, Hirst would have been familiar with this sacrament, and maybe partaken in it himself.iii
However, the integration of Reconciliation, a work ostensibly inspired by Catholic imagery, within the context of Hirst’s Mandalas exhibition at White Cube, London, 2019, named for the Eastern religious motif, suggests a widening of Hirst’s religious sources beyond his Christian childhood. The butterfly, a longtime symbol in Hirst’s work, takes on wider significance in Reconciliation and related canvases. The butterfly has symbolized the cycle of life and death in a variety of cultures—from the Ancient Greeks and medieval Irish, who saw butterflies as the fluttering souls of the departed, to contemporary associations of butterflies with the fragility of life.iv Even in the secular world of science, the butterfly is an indicator of shifting life cycles; butterfly populations and migration patterns can help us measure the effects of climate change.v In the Catholic context of Hirst’s childhood, and wider world religions represented in Mandalas, Hirst’s butterfly works trade in an expanded dialogue on the transience of life and stillness of death, present throughout the artist’s oeuvre at large.
i “Overview: Damien Hirst, Mandalas,” White Cube, 2019, online.
ii Ibid.
iii Jonathan Jones, “Damien Hirst: ‘I was a Catholic until I was 12. I loved the imagery—the blood,’” The Irish Times, Feb. 25, 2021, online.
iv Rod Mengham, “Butterfly Affect,” in Damien Hirst: Mandalas, White Cube, London, 2019, p. 4; Patrick Barkham, “Damien Hirst’s butterflies: distressing but weirdly uplifting,” The Guardian, Apr. 18, 2012, online.
v Tara Cornelisse, “Study: Climate Change Contributing to Widespread Butterfly Decline Across Western United States,” Center for Biological Diversity, Mar. 4, 2021, online.
Provenance
White Cube, London Acquired from the above by the present owner
Exhibited
London, White Cube, Damien Hirst: Mandalas, September 20–November 2, 2019, pp. 137, 185 (illustrated, pp. 139, 188; detail illustrated, pp. 140-141, 143)
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.
signed, stamped with the artist’s stamp, titled and dated "2018 Damien Hirst 'Reconciliation'" on the reverse butterflies and household gloss on canvas diameter 72 in. (182.9 cm) Executed in 2018.
This work is accompanied by a letter issued by the artist’s studio, Science, UK indicating that in their opinion it does not contain endangered species according to the species database published by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).