.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Distinguished by its ovular form, the present work is a radiant example of Damien Hirst’s celebrated butterfly paintings. Eight delicate specimens are suspended within luminous yellow, as if halted in flight across the face of the sun. Their wings fan out in jewelled tones of blue and orange, casting fleeting shadows upon the work’s surface. Exploring the relationship between life, death and art, Hirst’s butterfly paintings represent some of his most bewitching works. Evolving from his seminal installation In and Out of Love (1991), they occupy the same conceptual terrain as his formaldehyde vitrines, which had won him the Turner Prize in 1995. The tiny winged creatures are frozen mid-air, splayed against the void and spared from inevitable decay. Just like science and religion, proposes Hirst, art too can court the promise of everlasting life: here, his butterflies are reborn on canvas, preserved for eternity in a world of dazzling colour.
In and Out of Love was Hirst’s first solo exhibition in London. Spread over two floors at Woodstock Street Gallery, it shared much in common with his groundbreaking 1990 installation A Thousand Years, which similarly gave form to fleeting existential cycles. On the ground floor, the artist created an artificial humid space that served as a kind of butterfly breeding ground. ‘I had white paintings with shelves on and the paintings had live pupae for butterflies glued on them’, he recalls. ‘The pupae hatched from the paintings and flew around, so it was like an environment for butterflies’ (D. Hirst, quoted in Damien Hirst: The Agony and the Ecstasy, exh. cat. Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples 2004, pp. 74-77). Downstairs, he mounted eight brightly-coloured monochrome canvases with dead butterflies pressed into their surfaces. These works, now held in the Yale Center for British Art, were the prototype for his future butterfly paintings. Over the years he has produced them in different sizes, colours and shapes, including circles, squares and hearts.
In 1997, three years before the present work, Hirst had featured in Charles Saatchi’s landmark exhibition Sensation at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. This epoch-defining show positioned the Young British Artists (YBAs) on the global stage. While many of his contemporaries embraced raw, candid modes of self-expression, Hirst took to task some of art history’s grandest themes. The butterfly paintings offered succinct expressions of his central concerns, finding beauty in mortality and hope in the face of the abyss. In the present work, the unpredictable dance of life and death is distilled to vision of sleek, near-Minimalist abstraction, each insect embalmed in brilliant monochrome. The Greek goddess Psyche had often been depicted with butterfly wings; in Christian iconography, it became a symbol of the resurrection. Here, Hirst plays with these associations, positing art itself as an antidote to death. The butterfly, imbued with new life, ‘still has this really optimistic beauty of a wonderful thing’ (D. Hirst, ibid., p. 83).
In and Out of Love was Hirst’s first solo exhibition in London. Spread over two floors at Woodstock Street Gallery, it shared much in common with his groundbreaking 1990 installation A Thousand Years, which similarly gave form to fleeting existential cycles. On the ground floor, the artist created an artificial humid space that served as a kind of butterfly breeding ground. ‘I had white paintings with shelves on and the paintings had live pupae for butterflies glued on them’, he recalls. ‘The pupae hatched from the paintings and flew around, so it was like an environment for butterflies’ (D. Hirst, quoted in Damien Hirst: The Agony and the Ecstasy, exh. cat. Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples 2004, pp. 74-77). Downstairs, he mounted eight brightly-coloured monochrome canvases with dead butterflies pressed into their surfaces. These works, now held in the Yale Center for British Art, were the prototype for his future butterfly paintings. Over the years he has produced them in different sizes, colours and shapes, including circles, squares and hearts.
In 1997, three years before the present work, Hirst had featured in Charles Saatchi’s landmark exhibition Sensation at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. This epoch-defining show positioned the Young British Artists (YBAs) on the global stage. While many of his contemporaries embraced raw, candid modes of self-expression, Hirst took to task some of art history’s grandest themes. The butterfly paintings offered succinct expressions of his central concerns, finding beauty in mortality and hope in the face of the abyss. In the present work, the unpredictable dance of life and death is distilled to vision of sleek, near-Minimalist abstraction, each insect embalmed in brilliant monochrome. The Greek goddess Psyche had often been depicted with butterfly wings; in Christian iconography, it became a symbol of the resurrection. Here, Hirst plays with these associations, positing art itself as an antidote to death. The butterfly, imbued with new life, ‘still has this really optimistic beauty of a wonderful thing’ (D. Hirst, ibid., p. 83).