Damien Hirst - Damien Hirst: Online Auction London Thursday, October 17, 2024 | Phillips
  • “Pills are hope. Pills can kill.”
    —Damien Hirst
    Damien Hirst’s pill cabinets, such as End of Days, epitomise his enduring fascination with the intersection of medicine, mortality, and belief systems. For Hirst, pharmaceuticals are emblematic of our modern search for salvation – science’s attempt to replace religion as the answer to life’s most existential questions. Each pill, meticulously arranged within its cabinet, is a reminder of our dependence on these tiny, synthetic symbols of healing and control. Inspired by his own childhood experiences – Hirst's mother worked for a pharmaceutical company – he began creating the pill cabinets in the early 1990s, translating the cold sterility of the pharmacy into the realm of contemporary art. His works convey a stark duality: pills are both promises of health and poignant symbols of death, epitomising humanity’s fraught relationship with the promise of immortality. This thematic obsession was extended to his Pharmacy restaurants (Notting Hill, London, 1998-2003, and Vauxhall, London, 2016–18), where pill motifs adorned the interior, blurring the line between art, medicine, and consumerism.


    Formally, the pill cabinets share a minimalist aesthetic that connects them to Hirst’s spot paintings, both series relying on repetition and colour to mesmerise and provoke. However, where the spot paintings offer a dizzying, abstract array of coloured dots with no discernible content, the pill cabinets give each object an explicit function, grounding the viewer in the language of pharmaceuticals. These arrangements of vividly coloured pills resemble candy-like ornaments, yet their medicinal potency underscores their darker subtext – life, death, and the illusion of control. Hirst’s pills act as a modern iconography, where medicine replaces the traditional icons of faith, alluding to a contemporary, secular belief in the omnipotence of science. In this body of work, Hirst raises provocative questions about our reliance on pharmaceuticals, suggesting that in contemporary society’s quest for meaning and control, science has taken on a quasi-religious role.
    “There are four important things in life: religion, love, art and science. At their best, they’re all just tools to help you find a path through the darkness. None of them really work that well, but they help. Of all of them, science seems to be the one right now. Like religion, it provides the glimmer of hope that maybe it will be all right in the end.”
    —Damien Hirst

    • 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

42

Day in Day Out

2003
Multiple comprising Dymo tape and pills within a stainless steel, aluminium, glass and painted MDF cabinet.
30.6 x 61.1 x 7.5 cm (12 x 24 x 2 7/8 in.)
Signed, titled, dated and numbered 33/35 in black felt-tip pen on the reverse (there were also 7 artist's proofs), published by the artist.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
£20,000 - 30,000 

Sold for £177,800

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Damien Hirst: Online Auction

17 - 25 October 2024