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Lot Essay
‘Art is like medicine—it can heal’ (Damien Hirst)
Nalorphine is an arresting early example of Damien Hirst’s iconic Pharmaceutical Paintings (1986-2011), popularly known as ‘spot paintings.’ It was executed in 1995, the year Hirst triumphed in the Turner Prize and confirmed his graduation from enfant terrible to leading light of contemporary British art. It belongs to the Controlled Substances, a subset of the almost 1,500 spot paintings, which saw Hirst experiment with arrangements beyond the series’ usual square and rectangular formats, with shaped canvases including triangles and diamonds. Each is titled after a ‘controlled’ drug that cannot be accessed by the non-medical public, and contains the name of the drug spelled out within the painting according to a colour code specified by Hirst in his parallel series of so-called ‘Key Paintings’. Nalorphine’s spots, which spell out the title in a diagonal running from the top left to bottom right of the painting, are arranged in a parallelogram. It is one of just three paintings to take this form. The work has been held in the collection of Tiqui Atencio and Ago Demirdjian since 1997: Atencio was a notable early supporter of Hirst and his Young British Artist contemporaries.
Hirst’s Pharmaceutical Paintings were conceived in 1986, when he was a first-year student at Goldsmiths College, and continued for the next twenty-five years. They were inspired by the artist’s love of snooker—a game whose coloured orbs collide and scatter in complex patterns of cause and effect—and his desire to create art that mirrored scientific and medical formulas. Each work in the series is titled after a drug in the 1990 Sigma-Aldrich Catalogue of Chemical Compounds. Nalorphine is an anti-opioid that has been removed from medical use for causing side-effects including anxiety and hallucinations. For an artist later infamous for giddy excesses such as the diamond-encrusted skull For the Love of God (2008) and the gigantic sculpture Demon with Bowl (2017), the spot paintings are works of unstinting, almost monastic discipline. Each spot is hand-painted in household gloss on canvas, and the gaps between the spots are equal in width to the spots themselves.
As in the oeuvre of fellow British painter Bridget Riley, Hirst’s rigorous, repetitive structure creates a hypnotic display, as the spots appear to shimmer and oscillate—in some cases recalling the effects of the drugs they are named after. ‘The steady pulse of the spots’, writes Michael Bracewell, ‘creates a contemplative visual force field. It is as though both the gaze and the painting become magnetised, with the viewer caught up within the tension between their combative currents’ (M. Bracewell, ‘Art Without the Angst—The Pharmaceutical Paintings of Damien Hirst’, in Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011, exh. cat. Gagosian Gallery, New York 2012, p. 5). Nalorphine’s tilted field of vibrant dots simultaneously provokes bliss and a sense of unease at its machine-like, science-inspired exactitude. It extends Andy Warhol’s idea of art as industrial production while affirming the uncanny precision of the human hand. These contradictions make Nalorphine as conceptually striking as it is hypnotic.
For Art’s Sake: Selected Works by Tiqui Atencio and Ago Demirdjian
‘I wanted to understand what it meant to spend one’s life surrounded by and devoted to art’ (Tiqui Atencio)
For Tiqui Atencio and Ago Demirdjian, art functions as a catalyst for conversation: between an artist and the world, and between the public and the society they inhabit. ‘[Artists] are the antennas of the world,’ Tiqui says, ‘picking up on the energy and transforming it into their own vocabulary for us to appreciate, to see, to feel.’ For the Venezuelan-born collector and tastemaker, those conversations began in her early 20s, when her beloved aunt and uncle started taking her to galleries and museums all over the world. Enthralled by the works of art that she saw, Tiqui set out to learn as much as she could, sparking what would become a lifetime endeavour.
The product of these visits, along with countless other conversations, is a dynamic collection that encapsulates the artistic zeitgeist of the past few decades. Following the sale of selected works in New York, Paris and London earlier this year, Christie’s is delighted to present a large and outstanding group from the collection in London this October. Spread across the 20th/21st Century Evening Sale and Post-War & Contemporary Art Day and Online Sales, these works capture Tiqui’s immersion in the British art scene at the turn of the millennium. Among them are exceptional works by Damien Hirst, including Never Mind (1990-1991)—one of the artist’s earliest Medicine Cabinets—and the rare parallelogram-shaped Pharmaceutical Painting Nalorphine (1995). Works by Antony Gormley, Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin and others are brought into dialogue with international artists including Franz West, Fischli & Weiss and Sarah Morris. The group also pays tribute to Tiqui’s love of Latin American art, with works by artists such as Carlos Garaicoa, Oscar Murillo and Ernesto Neto.
Tiqui’s highly refined eye has led her to become a sought-after advisor to museums around the world. Together she and Ago have served on influential committees including the International Council of the Tate Gallery in London, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. Tiqui’s passion to communicate the joys she has found in art has also resulted in several critically acclaimed books, including Could Have, Would Have, Should Have (Art/Books, 2016), For Art’s Sake: Inside the Homes of Art Dealers (Rizzoli, 2020), and Inside the Homes of Artists: For Art’s Sake (Rizzoli, 2024).
Nalorphine is an arresting early example of Damien Hirst’s iconic Pharmaceutical Paintings (1986-2011), popularly known as ‘spot paintings.’ It was executed in 1995, the year Hirst triumphed in the Turner Prize and confirmed his graduation from enfant terrible to leading light of contemporary British art. It belongs to the Controlled Substances, a subset of the almost 1,500 spot paintings, which saw Hirst experiment with arrangements beyond the series’ usual square and rectangular formats, with shaped canvases including triangles and diamonds. Each is titled after a ‘controlled’ drug that cannot be accessed by the non-medical public, and contains the name of the drug spelled out within the painting according to a colour code specified by Hirst in his parallel series of so-called ‘Key Paintings’. Nalorphine’s spots, which spell out the title in a diagonal running from the top left to bottom right of the painting, are arranged in a parallelogram. It is one of just three paintings to take this form. The work has been held in the collection of Tiqui Atencio and Ago Demirdjian since 1997: Atencio was a notable early supporter of Hirst and his Young British Artist contemporaries.
Hirst’s Pharmaceutical Paintings were conceived in 1986, when he was a first-year student at Goldsmiths College, and continued for the next twenty-five years. They were inspired by the artist’s love of snooker—a game whose coloured orbs collide and scatter in complex patterns of cause and effect—and his desire to create art that mirrored scientific and medical formulas. Each work in the series is titled after a drug in the 1990 Sigma-Aldrich Catalogue of Chemical Compounds. Nalorphine is an anti-opioid that has been removed from medical use for causing side-effects including anxiety and hallucinations. For an artist later infamous for giddy excesses such as the diamond-encrusted skull For the Love of God (2008) and the gigantic sculpture Demon with Bowl (2017), the spot paintings are works of unstinting, almost monastic discipline. Each spot is hand-painted in household gloss on canvas, and the gaps between the spots are equal in width to the spots themselves.
As in the oeuvre of fellow British painter Bridget Riley, Hirst’s rigorous, repetitive structure creates a hypnotic display, as the spots appear to shimmer and oscillate—in some cases recalling the effects of the drugs they are named after. ‘The steady pulse of the spots’, writes Michael Bracewell, ‘creates a contemplative visual force field. It is as though both the gaze and the painting become magnetised, with the viewer caught up within the tension between their combative currents’ (M. Bracewell, ‘Art Without the Angst—The Pharmaceutical Paintings of Damien Hirst’, in Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011, exh. cat. Gagosian Gallery, New York 2012, p. 5). Nalorphine’s tilted field of vibrant dots simultaneously provokes bliss and a sense of unease at its machine-like, science-inspired exactitude. It extends Andy Warhol’s idea of art as industrial production while affirming the uncanny precision of the human hand. These contradictions make Nalorphine as conceptually striking as it is hypnotic.
For Art’s Sake: Selected Works by Tiqui Atencio and Ago Demirdjian
‘I wanted to understand what it meant to spend one’s life surrounded by and devoted to art’ (Tiqui Atencio)
For Tiqui Atencio and Ago Demirdjian, art functions as a catalyst for conversation: between an artist and the world, and between the public and the society they inhabit. ‘[Artists] are the antennas of the world,’ Tiqui says, ‘picking up on the energy and transforming it into their own vocabulary for us to appreciate, to see, to feel.’ For the Venezuelan-born collector and tastemaker, those conversations began in her early 20s, when her beloved aunt and uncle started taking her to galleries and museums all over the world. Enthralled by the works of art that she saw, Tiqui set out to learn as much as she could, sparking what would become a lifetime endeavour.
The product of these visits, along with countless other conversations, is a dynamic collection that encapsulates the artistic zeitgeist of the past few decades. Following the sale of selected works in New York, Paris and London earlier this year, Christie’s is delighted to present a large and outstanding group from the collection in London this October. Spread across the 20th/21st Century Evening Sale and Post-War & Contemporary Art Day and Online Sales, these works capture Tiqui’s immersion in the British art scene at the turn of the millennium. Among them are exceptional works by Damien Hirst, including Never Mind (1990-1991)—one of the artist’s earliest Medicine Cabinets—and the rare parallelogram-shaped Pharmaceutical Painting Nalorphine (1995). Works by Antony Gormley, Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin and others are brought into dialogue with international artists including Franz West, Fischli & Weiss and Sarah Morris. The group also pays tribute to Tiqui’s love of Latin American art, with works by artists such as Carlos Garaicoa, Oscar Murillo and Ernesto Neto.
Tiqui’s highly refined eye has led her to become a sought-after advisor to museums around the world. Together she and Ago have served on influential committees including the International Council of the Tate Gallery in London, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. Tiqui’s passion to communicate the joys she has found in art has also resulted in several critically acclaimed books, including Could Have, Would Have, Should Have (Art/Books, 2016), For Art’s Sake: Inside the Homes of Art Dealers (Rizzoli, 2020), and Inside the Homes of Artists: For Art’s Sake (Rizzoli, 2024).