Damien Hirst - New Now New York Wednesday, September 27, 2023 | Phillips

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  • Damien Hirst’s Kill Monster, 2008, juxtaposes the delicacy of the butterflies — one of Hirst's most iconic motifs – and the industrial monochrome of red and black. Despite the harsh title of the work, the butterflies glide gracefully within the confines of the square canvases, evoking a sense of longing for freedom. However, these once-vibrant creatures are immobilized, pressed into the glossy paint on the canvas. Their wings shimmer as if they were still fluttering just moments before, yet now they are frozen in time, their beauty forever immaculate. Emblematic of Hirst’s maverick sensibility and an unerring aesthetic instinct, Kill Monster poetically delves into the cycle of life and death, fragility and permanence, and the juncture of art and reality.

    “I think I’ve got an obsession with death, but I think it’s like a celebration of life rather than something morbid. You can’t have one without the other.”
    —Damien Hirst

    Hirst first incorporated butterflies into his practice with In and Out of Love, his first solo exhibition at Woodstock Street Gallery, London, in 1991. A catalyst for critical excitement in the contemporary art scene, the exhibition witnessed the entire life cycle of butterflies at its two-floored venue. On one floor, butterflies were hatched, sustained by sugar water, and flew freely until their eventual death. Monochrome canvases were mounted on walls, with plants positioned beneath to attract the butterflies to settle on the canvases. Conversely, the other floor featured bright pastel paintings embellished with dead butterflies.

     

    Analogous to the paintings from In and Out of Love, Kill Monster captures the fleeting cycle of life, growth, and change within the abyss of black and red. The only two colors, black and red, allude to death and violence, calling back the title of the artwork, but also to love and passion, mirroring Hirst’s own romantic view of mortality. With one canvas at a 45° angle to the other, the two realms of love and death tilt towards one another in a poetic reminder of their interconnected state.

    • Provenance

      Gagosian Gallery, New York
      Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2011

    • 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

41

Kill Monster

each signed, titled, respectively inscribed and dated "Damien Hirst 2008 "Kill Monster" panel [1-2]" on the reverse
butterflies and household gloss on canvas, diptych
(i) 34 x 34 in. (86.4 x 86.4 cm)
(ii) 24 x 24 in. (61 x 61 cm)

Executed in 2008.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$100,000 - 150,000 

Sold for $127,000

Contact Specialist

Avery Semjen
Associate Specialist, Head of New Now Sale 
T +1 212 940 1207
asemjen@phillips.com

New Now

New York Auction 27 September 2023