“I think rather than be personal you have to find universal triggers: everyone's frightened of glass, everyone's frightened of sharks, everyone loves butterflies.”
— Damien Hirst

Possessing a remarkable vitality and chromatic variety, Omnipotence is a strikingly radiant example of British artist Damien Hirst’s celebrated Kaleidoscope series. Contrasted against the bold tangerine ground here, iridescent butterfly wings from a wide variety of specimens are carefully arranged in a radial fashion, their dazzling fractured shards of lapis, citrine, topaz, and opal shades appearing to splinter and multiply before our eyes. Elegiac reflections on mortality and transience of beauty, butterflies have proven to be an important conceptual touchstone throughout the artist’s provocative practice, drawing together Hirst's fascination with colour and systems of structuring it, collecting practices and the aesthetics of display, and the intersections of art, science, and religion.
 

Although Hirst first formalised the Kaleidoscope series in 2001 with It’s a Wonderful World, his fascination with butterflies and lepidoptery can be traced to the earliest stages of his career. Following the legendary 1988 Freeze exhibition that he curated while still a student at Goldsmiths, Hirst’s first solo show - In and Out of Love - used butterflies to sensational effect. Transforming the ground floor of the Woodstock Street Gallery into a humid hothouse, Hirst hung the walls with pupae-covered canvases from which hundreds of butterflies emerged during the exhibition, completing their short life cycles in situ. While this early installation and Hirst’s Butterfly Monochrome paintings worked to expose the ways in which ‘the symbol exists apart from the thing’, highlighting the gap that exists between our fantasised ideal of the butterfly and our confrontation with its material reality, in these late works, Hirst moves closer to an almost religious expression of adoration and perfection.ⁱ
 

Adopting the appearance of delicate stained glass, in its luminosity and radial arrangement, Omnipotence takes on the appearance of the kind of Gothic Rose window discovered in the most spectacular Cathedrals of Europe – a point directly referenced in the titles of some of the works from the series. Although not directly referencing ecclesiastical sites or architectural elements, the title of the present work of course also carries with it a strong sense of doctrinal wisdom, the omnipotence of the deity taken as a foundation stone for many different belief systems. Absorbing and meditative, the devotional aspect of the Mandala works was further emphasised by Hirst in the Psalm subseries, a limited group of butterfly works that Hirst started in 2008 - the same year as the current work’s execution.
 

Deeply metaphysical, Hirst’s work has long been interested in systems of belief, and here we can see the butterfly being invoked to speak to the more religious questions of the soul and the resurrection, adopted as the ‘trace element of the spiritual in a fallen world and associated with the hand of the divine in the creation of material existence.’ⁱⁱ

 

Collector’s Digest

• Coming to prominence in the late 1980s as part of the group identified by collector and gallerist Charles Saatchi as a generation of ‘Young British Artists’, Damien Hirst is best known for his boundary-pushing sculptures of animals submerged in formaldehyde, and his sustained investigation of seriality, repetition, death and belief.
• Works from the Kaleidoscope series were first exhibited as part of Hirst’s 2003 White Cube show Romance in the Age of Uncertainty. In 2007, Hirst presented a major series of theses paintings in his solo exhibition Superstition with Gagosian Gallery in London and Beverly Hills.

 

 

ⁱ Damien Hirst, I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, London, 2005, p. 118. 

ⁱⁱ Rod Mengham, ‘Butterfly Affect’, in Damien Hirst: Mandalas, exh. cat., White Cube, London, 2019, p. 4.