Damien Hirst - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, November 15, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Gagosian Gallery, New York

  • Exhibited

    New York, Gagosian Gallery, What’s Modern?, November 6 – December 18, 2004; New York, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, The Other Side #2. Radical Pursuits: Delights in the subversive and sublime, November 11, 2006 – February 3, 2007

  • Literature

    A. H. Barr, Jr., What’s Modern?, New York / Montreal, 2004, pp. 98-99 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    Damien Hirst is without a doubt the world’s most famous living artist; since curating the groundbreaking Freeze exhibition in 1988 he has produced a body of work that has sparked controversies of condemnation and celebration everywhere it has been presented.  Some accuse Hirst of sensationalism and self-promotion; others credit him with formulating his generation’s most poignant statement on the fundamental trauma embodied in the essential co-existence of life and death, as well as with introducing a group of young artists who collectively exerted an unprecedented influence on the shape and tone of contemporary art at the end of the twentieth century.   “Q: Why are you so obsessed with death? A: I’m really obsessed with life, and death is the point where life stops.” (D. Hirst, quoted in I Want To Spend The Rest Of My Life Everywhere, With Everyone, One To One, Always, Forever, Now (R. Viollete, ed.), Booth-Clibborn, London, 1997).   Hirst’s oeuvre—which ranges from unconventional sculptural installations comprised of decaying livestock, living flies, preserved sharks, exactingly arranged surgical instruments and enormous ashtrays filled with cigarette butts to vividly colorful paintings in dot and spun-splatter configurations—conflates the iconography and media of art, religion, and science, challenging the received wisdom that such serious concerns as the essential ambiguities inherent in human existence, the realities of our biological frailty, and “the ironies, falsehoods and desires that we mobilize to negotiate our own alienation and mortality” (N. Rosenthal, S. Fraquelli, eds. Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1997) can only be explored through traditional means such as painterly expression.  While inevitably visually arresting, the commonplace qualities and apparent simplicity of his materials—and their at times controversial insertion into the contemporary art lexicon—have a tendency to mask the profundity of his compositions; the invested viewer, however, will detect a very real current of existential poetry and pathos in Hirst’s work, be it in the form of fly zappers or cigarette lighters, pill bottles or butterflies.     “I’m interested in realism.  I want art to be life but it never can be.” (D. Hirst, quoted in I Want To Spend The Rest Of My Life Everywhere, With Everyone, One To One, Always, Forever, Now (R. Viollete, ed.), Booth-Clibborn, London, 1997).     Perhaps the dominant trend in Hirst’s career to date has been the use of animals to illustrate essential truths about the cycle of life: in early works such as A Thousand Years (1990), maggots spawned from rotting meet developed into hundreds of black flies only to meet their end in the electric current of a bug zapper, all within the hermetic universe of his trademark glass vitrines.  By using these animals in his work, Hirst comments not only on the mortality of these particular creatures, but on the idea of mortality on general.  It is in fact this larger notion of balance in nature and eternal cycles—life and death—the Hirst is most concerned with in his works of art.  From his earliest taxidermies  through to his latest exhibition appropriately titled Beyond Belief, at London’s White Cube Gallery, Hirst has probed the grand theoretical constructs of mortality and eternal life.  While A Thousand Years, as well as works such as the infamous Mother and Child Divided (1993) contained a beautiful, if brutal, honesty in their grotesque presentation, Hirst does not spend all of his time wallowing in the macabre—in fact, he has every bit as much appreciation for conventional aesthetic splendor and lively color as any other artists, hence the career-long recurrence of one of his favorite symbols of the beauty and fragility of the life cycle, the butterfly.     “I wanted these paintings to be more ‘real’ than a de Kooning painting, where the color leaps off the canvas and flies around the room.” (D. Hirst, quoted in I Want To Spend The Rest Of My Life Everywhere, With Everyone, One To One, Always, Forever, Now (R. Viollete, ed.), Booth-Clibborn, London, 1997).   For centuries the butterfly has been revered and reproduced by numerous cultural and religious groups, not only for its inherent beauty, but also for its symbolic significance.  The butterfly can represent development, change, and evolution at its most basic physiological level.  The insect’s metamorphosis into a fully realized butterfly is one that is familiar to many; the egg hatches into a caterpillar which grows and then develops into a formed butterfly.  It is in this unusual and fragile natural transformation that the process of life begins.  To others, the butterfly’s associations are more symbolic and steeped with religious and spiritual meaning.  The ancient Greek goddess of beauty Psyche was frequently depicted as a butterfly, or part butterfly, in ancient iconography.  To the native Americans, it is believed that if you whisper a secret to a butterfly, the secret will be safe forever, release it and it will carry your wish to the Great Spirit.  It is only by releasing the butterfly from captivity that it will help to restore the balance of nature and your wish will be granted.   First introduced in the landmark 1991 installation “In And Out of Love” at London’s Woodstock Gallery, in which hundreds of live tropical butterflies were released into the gallery space, these vibrantly bright and bold, yet delicate winged creatures have become a hallmark of Hirst’s paintings.  Their transformation from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly is one of the more spectacular cycles of metamorphosis nature has to offer, and the tragic beauty with which butterflies endure their short life span strikes at the heart of Hirst’s artistic project.   Love Affair, 2001 is emblematic of Hirst’s butterfly monochromes: against a deep, saturated purple background suggestive of the night sky, actual tropical butterflies are affixed intermittently to the canvas.  Their physical bodies at rest impart an air of tranquility, yet paradoxically a sense of movement as well, almost as if the painting exists as a single frame snatched from the continuum of real life.  More realistic than the most successful illusionism, more alive than even the most lively of expressionist paintings, by his use of butterflies Hirst has expanded the possibilities of the painted canvas and added a colorful, lighthearted, but no less profound chapter to his ongoing meditation on life and death.

  • 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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Love Affair

2001
Gloss household paint on canvas with butterflies.
100 3/8 x 69 3/8 in. (255 x 176.2 cm).

Estimate
$1,500,000 - 2,500,000 

Sold for $2,281,000

Contemporary Art Part I

15 Nov 2007, 7pm
New York