Damien Hirst - 20th Century to Now London Friday, June 30, 2023 | Phillips

20th Century to Now

London Auction 30 June 2023

  • “My first ever Spot Painting was loose and painted with drippy paint and not minimal at all. In that painting, I was wrestling with what I originally thought of as the coldness of Minimalism and the more emotional Abstract Expressionist painting style I’d grown up with. At the time I painted it, it felt uncool and I abandoned it immediately for the rigidity of the grid, removing the mess, but after doing the Spot catalogue raisonné I’ve felt really drawn to that first painting and knew I’d revisit it eventually.” 
    —Damien Hirst 

     

    The seller will be donating the net proceeds of the sale of Toddler's Cloud to the charity Ruwenzori Foundation.

    • Provenance

      The Artist

    • 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.

      View More Works

PROPERTY SOLD TO BENEFIT THE RUWENZORI FOUNDATION

34

Damien Hirst

Toddler's Cloud

signed, titled and inscribed 'COLOUR SPACE Damien Hirst 'Toddler's Cloud' 2016' on the reverse; signed and stamped with the artist's stamp 'D. Hirst' on the stretcher
household gloss on canvas
244 x 305 cm (96 1/8 x 120 1/8 in.)
Painted in 2016.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
£400,000 - 600,000 †

Sold for £285,750

Contact Specialist

Leonor de Osma
Head of Sale, 20th Century to Now
T +44 20 7901 7912
M +44 7584 086 052
ldeosma@phillips.com

20th Century to Now

London Auction 30 June 2023