Damien Hirst - Evening & Day Editions London Thursday, January 23, 2025 | Phillips
  • “I love butterflies because when they are dead they look alive… They represent the soul.”
    —Damien Hirst

    • Condition Report

    • Description

      View our Conditions of Sale.

    • Literature

      see The Paragon Press 2006-2010, pp. 296-297

    • 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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32

The Souls on Jacob's Ladder Take Their Flight (Unique)

2008-09
Unique etching and aquatint in colours, on Arches paper, with full margins.
I. 93.3 x 85.6 cm (36 3/4 x 33 3/4 in.)
S. 119.4 x 108 cm (47 x 42 1/2 in.)

Signed, dated '2008' and annotated 'U.P.' in pencil, from the edition of 102 unique variants (there were also 20 artist's proofs), published by The Paragon Press, London, framed.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
£15,000 - 20,000 ‡♠

Place Advance Bid
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Senior International Specialist, Editions
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Evening & Day Editions

London Auction 23 - 24 January 2025