Damien Hirst - Contemporary Art London Friday, October 13, 2006 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    White Cube, London

  • Catalogue Essay


    “If you look closely at any one of these paintings a strange thing happens: because of the lack of repeated colours there is no harmony. We are used to picking out chords of the same color and balancing them with different chords of other colours to create meaning. This can’t happen. So in every painting there is a subliminal sense of unease; yet the colours project so much joy it’s hard to feel it, but it’s there. The horror underlying everything. The horror that can overwhelm everything at any moment.” (Damien Hirst quoted in R. Violette, ed., I Want to Spend the Rest of my Life Everywhere, With Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, New York, 1997)

  • 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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15

Biphenol

1996
Gloss household paint on canvas.
20 1/4 x 18 in. (51.4 x 45.7 cm).
Signed “D Hirst” on the reverse.

Estimate
£80,000 - 120,000 ‡♠

Sold for £153,600

Contemporary Art

14 Oct 2006, 7pm
London