Damien Hirst - New Now London Wednesday, April 10, 2019 | Phillips

New Now

London Auction 11 April 2019

  • Provenance

    Private Collection

  • Catalogue Essay

    Re-imagining the corporate brand logos that we come into everyday contact with, Transportation, 2014, reflects Damien Hirst’s uniquely irreverent artistic practice, whereby boundaries between tradition and commerce, nature and culture, are perpetually investigated and blurred. Although moving past the artist’s usual subject matters – spots, butterflies, skulls, pills – Transportation lays the coloured logos out into a grid-like arrangement similar to the artist's Spot Paintings. Hirst continues his exploration of what underpins human culture and society, reiterating his pervasive claim that humanity, in the face of life and death, is sustained by the notion of transience. Reflecting on the consumer habits that define modern lifestyles and identities, Transportation aligns with Hirst’s series of Medicine and Pill Cabinets, which through the rigorous arrangement of pills and medicinal components, equally presents a commentary on contemporary consumerism. ‘In terms of consumerism and all that sort of stuff, art has been in a constant battle for hundreds of years with every other kind of image-making’, the artist writes (Damien Hirst, quoted in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, reproduced on damienhirst.com). A stellar example of the artist’s inventive, almost clinical visual repertoire, Transportation straddles a number of social and existential concepts that are of utmost relevance today.

  • 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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Damien Hirst

Transportation

signed, titled, inscribed, dedicated and dated '2014 for Anne 'Transportation' Damien Hirst Fuck em all!' on the reverse; further signed and stamped with the artist's studio stamp 'Damien Hirst' on the stretcher
signwriting paint on canvas
115.6 x 137.2 cm (45 1/2 x 54 in.)
Painted in 2014.

Estimate
£100,000 - 150,000 ♠

Sold for £162,500

Contact Specialist
Simon Tovey
Head of Sale
+44 20 7318 4084

New Now

London Auction 11 April 2019