Damien Hirst - Contemporary Art Day Sale London Thursday, February 16, 2012 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Private Collection, New York

  • 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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222

Unique Blue Butterfly

2008
Colour photogravure etching on 400gsm Velin Arches paper.
120 × 108 cm (47 1/4 × 42 1/2 in).
Signed, dated and inscribed ‘Damien Hirst 2008 U.P.’ lower margin. This work is unique and registered in the archive of Damien Hirst (DHS 10375).

Estimate
£22,000 - 30,000 ♠†

Sold for £27,500

Contemporary Art Day Sale

17 February 2012
London