Provenance
Private Collection, London
Catalogue Essay

"I’ve always had an interest in the music biz. I got my interest in art from album covers. I was painting album covers on mates’ jackets at school. I loved The Beatles – Peter Blake and Sgt Pepper, Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground."
(from [Ian] Rankin and Damien Hirst in conversation, The Times, 22 October 2009)
Damien Hirst painted his Beautiful Hours Spin Painting VI as he designed cover art for See the Light, the second album by rock group The Hours; he additionally helped to fund the recording of the album and created all of the associated artwork for this and their debut album, Narcissus Road. Band members Antony Genn and Martin Slattery share with Hirst a developed appreciation of music though it is one musician in particular who united them: Joe Strummer, singer, songwriter and guitarist of The Clash who collaborated with Genn and Slattery in The Mescaleros. Hirst and Strummer formed a tight personal bond after meeting at a music festival in the 1990s; this bond later extended to include their families, and the group would holiday side by side annually. Strummer died in 2002, and Hirst described the subsequent absence as leaving "a big hole" in his life and "the first time I felt mortal".
It is life and death that we recognize as the most frequent obsessions in Hirst’s work, and the present lot demonstrates both. In Hirst’s Beautiful Hours painting, symbols for life’s fleetingness are crossed and multiplied: a skull with clocks for eyes, simultaneously solidifying and dissolving; the canvas depicting a soupy, painterly big bang from which the skull is birthed – and into which it conversely recedes. The painting invokes the spirit of vanitas still life, the 16th and 17th-century painterly tradition which gathers motifs of clocks, skulls and rotting fruit to guarantee its message is not misread; all roads lead to the same place. Presently, a message which pushes beyond a one dimensional reading of mortality, one that could be used to summarize Hirst’s interests generally: death is certain, death is eternal; but also, death is beautiful.
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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9

Damien Hirst

Beautiful Hours Spin Painting VI

2008
Household gloss on canvas.
203.2 × 177.8 cm (80 × 70 in).

Signed, titled and dated 'Damien Hirst "Beautiful Hours Spin Painting VI" 2008' on the reverse and further signed 'Damien Hirst' on the stretcher.

Estimate
£250,000 - 350,000

Sold for £289,250

MUSIC - Evening Sale

10 December 2010
London

1
Idris Khan
Rachmaninoff...Preludes
Estimate £35,000 - 40,000 ♠
Sold for £56,450
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2
Martin Creed
Work No. 134: Largo, larghetto, adagio, andante, moderato, allegro, presto e prestissimo
Estimate £35,000 - 45,000 ‡♠
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3
Christian Marclay
Les Vierges
Estimate £12,000 - 18,000
Sold for £22,500
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4
Gregor Hildebrandt
Pictures of You (Cure)
Estimate £18,000 - 22,000 ‡♠
Sold for £30,000
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5
Banks Violette
Untitled (Disappear)
Estimate £30,000 - 40,000 †
Sold for £30,000
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6
Banks Violette
Hate them (Single Stage)
Estimate £60,000 - 80,000 †
Sold for £61,250
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7
John Armleder
Untitled (FS 245)
Estimate £60,000 - 80,000 ‡
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8
George Condo
The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Estimate £60,000 - 80,000 ‡
Sold for £64,850
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9
Damien Hirst
Beautiful Hours Spin Painting VI
Estimate £250,000 - 350,000
Sold for £289,250
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10
Tracey Emin
Sometimes the Dress is Worth More Money Than the Money
Estimate £12,000 - 18,000
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11
Stanley Donwood
i) Problem Intensity ii) Become United iii) Business Penis
Estimate £15,000 - 20,000
Sold for £15,000
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12
Jenny Holzer
Selections from Truisms (1977–1979) and Survival (1983–1985)
Estimate £80,000 - 120,000 ‡
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13
Arman
Untitled
Estimate £80,000 - 150,000 ‡
Sold for £87,650
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14
Andy Warhol
Mick Jagger
Estimate £18,000 - 25,000 ‡
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15
Billy Childish
Self-Portrait
Estimate £12,000 - 18,000 ♠
Sold for £15,000
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16
Robert Crumb
Note to Marty Pahls
Estimate £6,000 - 8,000
Sold for £7,500
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17
Vanessa Beecroft
VBKW.16.JJ, Los Angeles
Estimate £12,000 - 18,000
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18
Vanessa Beecroft
VBKW.14.JJ, Los Angeles
Estimate £12,000 - 18,000
Sold for £11,875
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19
Dennis Morris
Marianne Faithful, Album cover 'Broken English'
Estimate £8,000 - 12,000
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MUSIC - Evening Sale

10 December 2010 London

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Provenance

Catalogue Essay

Artist Biography

Damien Hirst

9

Damien Hirst

Beautiful Hours Spin Painting VI

MUSIC - Evening Sale

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10 December 2010
London