Damien Hirst - Editions & Works on Paper New York Tuesday, April 18, 2023 | Phillips

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  • “An involvement with death and decay, and ideas and life: the action of the world on things exists somewhere, and the colour exists somewhere else. And it’s fantastic.”
    —Damien Hirst

    As the title and the cover of the box indicate, the portfolio[s are] based on the artist’s spin paintings, an ongoing series initiated in 1995 and titled with long strings of descriptive words… To make [the paintings] Hirst stands on a ladder and pours paint onto large circular canvases as they are rotated at high speed by a spin machine in his studio. The idea of using spin art to make high art came from Hirst’s collaborative participation with the artist Angust Fairhurst (1966–2008)… To create the images that make up In a Spin, the Action of the World on Things I [and II], the artist attached etching copperplates to his spin machine, and drew on them as they rotated with a range of sharp tools that includes needles and screwdrivers1. He utilised circular, square and rectangular etching plates of varying sizes – sometimes extending the circular pattern beyond the edges of the plate and at others entirely containing it within the plates’ margins. A combination of soft and hard ground etching has added painterly splashes of colour to the more regular circling lines. – Tate Modern, 2009

     

    Deborah Wye, Artists and Prints: Masterworks from The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York 2004

    • Provenance

      Paragon Press, London
      Acquired from the above by the present owner, 2002

    • Catalogue Essay

      Including (Volume I): Circles in the Sand; Burning Wheel; I get around; Liberty; My way; I saw the half of the moon; There's more to life than making jam and having kids; Global-a-go-go; Spin me right round; Lavender baby; Oh my God...and for those really stubborn stains; Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree; All around the world; Wheel meet again; Orbital; Billy Mill roundabout; Spinning Wheel; Wheel within a wheel; Like a snowball down a mountain; Ring-a-ring of roses; In a spin; Round; and You threw a melon at my head.

      Including (Volume II): Catherine Wheel; Follow my leader; Helter skelter; How to disappear completely; In the groove; Revolution; Spinning around; Spin spin sugar; The Twist; Throw it around; Twist and shout; Twisted insobriety; Vortex; and Windmills of my mind.

    • 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

Property from a Private Collection

158

In a Spin, the Action of the World on Things, Volumes I; and II

2002
The complete sets of volumes I and II, including 23 etchings in colors (vol. I) and 14 etchings in colors (vol. II), on Hahnmühle paper, with full margins, all contained in the original portfolios for each volume with unique spin paintings in household paint and screenprinted titles in gold on the covers respectively.
Volume I
all I. various sizes
all S. 35 3/4 x 27 7/8 in. (90.8 x 70.8 cm)
portfolio 38 1/4 x 29 3/4 x 1 in. (97.2 x 75.6 x 2.5 cm)
Volume II
all I. various sizes
all S. 43 3/8 x 35 3/4 in. (110.2 x 90.8 cm)
portfolio 43 3/8 x 35 3/4 x 1 in. (110.2 x 90.8 x 2.5 cm)

All the etchings signed in pencil, both portfolios numbered '15' in pencil on the colophons of vol. I and vol. II, the editions were both 68 (there were also 6 proof portfolios for each volume), published by The Paragon Press, London.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$80,000 - 120,000 

Contact Specialist

Editions@phillips.com
212 940 1220

 

Editions & Works on Paper

New York Auction 18 - 20 April 2023