“The death of an insect […] has this really optimistic beauty of a wonderful thing […] They don’t rot like humans.”
—Damien Hirst
Responding to Mirta d’Argenzio in an interview following his major retrospective at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Damien Hirst perfectly captures the dialectic at the heart of his use of the butterfly. A dramatic and poised image of life and death, in Midas Asteroid Hirst continues his exploration of mortality: a theme evident from the very beginnings of his artistic practice.
Emboldened after the success of his 1988 Freeze exhibition that catalysed the establishment of the Young British Art movement, the same punk-like audacity drove Hirst to new heights during the early 1990s. Working out of the makeshift apparatus that he had organised in his ‘cramped’ Brixton bedroom, Hirst conceived his groundbreaking installation In and Out of Love from experiments with breeding pupae.i Exhibiting in a vacant commercial space instead of a gallery, Hirst had timed the opening of his first London solo exhibition in 1991 with the hatching of butterfly pupae affixed to canvases, landing on the unsuspecting visitor as they flew around the space. On the lower ground floor, butterflies were pressed into the surfaces of eight vividly painted canvases, as if caught by chance in the gloss ground.
“The butterflies move between this life and the beyond: in the fleeting beauty of their suspended shimmering levitation, there is a lightness that simultaneously augurs the inevitability of death and thus the frailty of all that is worldly.”
—Damien Hirst
Executed in 2007, in Midas Asteroid Hirst recalls the composition of these earlier canvases. Titled after the ‘1981 Midas’ asteroid and the Greek legend of King Midas, Hirst develops themes related to mythology, metamorphosis, and mortality. Named after this potentially hazardous and monumental meteorite that was discovered in 1973 to orbit the sun with the earth, the butterflies’ physical path across the canvas traces the velocity of the comet, on the edge of obliterating humanity. As King Midas was granted the ability to turn everything that he touched into gold - a desire that was in fact a curse - the seductive reflective surface has equally entrapped the butterfly: an eternal mise en scène.
Typical of Hirst’s use of paradox, the butterfly symbolically and metaphysically manifests the beauty and brevity of our fleeting existence. A more hopeful foil to Hirst’s more nihilistic considerations of life including blackened masses of flies and formaldehyde vitrines, in their journey from pupae to caterpillar then chrysalis, the butterfly transcends a singular life cycle. Appealing tantalisingly to the senses, Midas Asteroid affirmingly reflects on the human condition, conjuring the possibilities of the cosmos beyond.
