Damien Hirst - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Tuesday, October 12, 2010 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Acquired directly from the artist

  • Catalogue Essay

    Damien Hirst has become the best-known artist of his generation, and much of his work for which he is now famed dwells on the themeof mortality. Consistent with this, his Biopsy Paintings series envision the microstructures of various forms of cancer and other diseases. Upon seeing these paintings, the spectator is at first impressed by the beauty of the abstraction, but is soon struck by the shocking content when viewing the works more closely. Contrasting aesthetics with underlying truth, the Biopsy Paintings spark a discourse about the discrepancy between appearance and reality. Following the tradition of Northern European still-life artists, Hirst uses broken glass, a scalpel and razor blades, hair, and blood-like pools of paint to create modern-day vanitas paintings.

  • 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

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Second series biopsy: M122/105

2008
UV inks and household gloss on canvas with glass, scalpel blades, flocking and religious medals.
160 x 121.9 cm (63 x 48 in).
Signed, titled and dated 'Damien Hirst Second series biopsy: M122/105 2008' on the reverse; signed 'Damien Hirst' on the stretcher.

Estimate
£150,000 - 200,000 ♠†

Sold for £181,250

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

13 October 2010
London