Damien Hirst - 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale London Thursday, March 8, 2018 | Phillips
  • Provenance

    Damien Hirst - Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, Sotheby's, London, 16 September 2008, lot 230
    Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

  • 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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164

Underworld

signed, titled and dated '2008 "Underworld" Damien Hirst' lower edge
butterflies and household gloss on paper
139.2 x 138 cm (54 3/4 x 54 3/8 in.)
Executed in 2008.

Estimate
£100,000 - 150,000 ‡♠

Sold for £137,500

Contact Specialist
Tamila Kerimova
Specialist, Head of Day Sale
+ 44 20 7318 4065
tkerimova@phillips.com

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale

London Auction 9 March 2018