“I love butterflies because when they are dead they look alive… They represent the soul.”
—Damien HirstDo not be fooled, despite the vivid, bubblegum tones of pink, yellow, blue, and green, Love Poems embodies Damien Hirst’s perpetual engagement with the universal and inevitable conclusion of human experience: death. Butterflies first emerged in the artist’s practice in 1991 when he graduated from Goldsmiths and, after being unable to secure a gallery, held his first solo exhibition in a vacant travel agent on Woodstock Street in London. Titled In and Out of Love, the exhibition was arranged across two floors. The ground floor comprised a humid, greenhouse-like environment with five white canvases on the walls to which butterfly pupae were attached. Here, amongst flowering plants and bowls of sugar, the newly born butterflies fluttered around the room, embodying beauty and the vitality of life. Nonetheless, in the basement below, eight glossy, vibrant canvases lined the walls with the limp carcasses of dead butterflies pressed into their surfaces. Here, as in countless artworks since, Hirst harnessed the butterflies’ mesmerising beauty and brief lifespan to foreground the transience of life and the universal presence of death.
Around a decade after In and Out of Love, Hirst encountered a Victorian tray adorned with butterfly wings, which sparked the inspiration for his Kaleidoscope paintings, in which he arranged real butterflies in entrancing kaleidoscopic patterns. These works, reminiscent of mandalas or gothic stained-glass windows, engage with the Victorian fascination of lepidopterology and its predecessor, the sixteenth-century Wunderkammer, or “cabinet of curiosity.” In creating these pieces, Hirst repurposed butterfly specimens from Victorian displays, arranging them in disciplined systems of colour and symmetry that echo his conceptual approach to the Spot paintings. The connection to lepidopterology remains present in Love Poems, however this process is distilled to its purest form: the butterflies are less concerned with optical theory and more with the interplay between vibrant life and inevitable death, reminding us that beauty is fleeting, yet in its transience, it becomes even more profound. “I think I’ve got an obsession with death, but I think it’s like a celebration of life rather than something morbid. You can’t have one without the other.”
—Damien HirstThrough the butterfly, Hirst reflects on universal conditions that bind our present alongside the past. As Hirst explained, the 1991 installation was “about love and realism […] life and death” and the dichotomy of “butterflies still being beautiful even when dead”. Much like the vicissitudes of life and love, butterflies symbolically and metaphysically embody the cruel paradoxes of human existence, combining immortal beauty and the frailty of physical reality through their fragile gossamer wings. The butterflies, with their jewel-like luminosity and iridescence, offer a hopeful counterpoint to Hirst’s bleaker artistic engagements with themes of life and death, such as his infamous 1990 work A Thousand Years, which utilised a severed cow's head and maggots. In Love Poems, the butterflies' beauty is central to Hirst's exploration of death; as Hirst himself noted, "You can’t have one without the other". For Hirst, the obsession with death is ultimately a celebration of life, inseparable from its counterpart, reminding us that life’s beauty is sharpened by its impermanence.
Catalogue Essay
Including Longing; To A Stranger; A Dream; Lullaby; She Walks In Beauty; and Sweet Disorder.
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.
2014 The complete set of six photo-gravure etchings with lithographic overlay in colours, on Arches paper, with full margins. all I. 60.4 x 60.6 cm (23 3/4 x 23 7/8 in.) all S. 78 x 76 cm (30 3/4 x 29 7/8 in.) All signed in pencil on the front and numbered 7/55 in pencil on the reverse (there were also 15 artist's proofs), published by The Paragon Press, London, all unframed.