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Lot Essay
Across a flawless, pale blue sky flutter a kaleidoscope of butterflies in Damien Hirst’s A Summers Day (2002). Caught mid-flight upon the painted surface, several large, brilliant blue morpho butterflies interlace with smaller tropical species in shades of red, orange and yellow. This monumental canvas, spanning over two and a half metres, fills the viewer’s field of vision in a mesmeric monochrome bejeweled with gossamer wings. The effect is of time stood still, a hazy summer moment captured and preserved. From Hirst’s earliest adoption of the butterfly motif in the early 1990s, these fragile creatures have become emblematic of the artist’s practice. Examples of Hirst’s celebrated butterfly monochromes are held in the permanent collections of museums including Tate, London and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. A Summers Day has been held in the same private collection for almost two decades.
Hirst’s fascination with the butterfly motif stems from the universal significance of these fragile, beautiful creatures. ‘You have to find universal triggers,’ Hirst explains. ‘Everyone’s frightened of glass, everyone’s frightened of sharks, everyone loves butterflies’ (D. Hirst quoted in A. Dannatt, ‘Damien Hirst: Life’s like this, then it stops’, Flash Art, No. 169, March–April 1993). Hirst first used butterflies in his debut solo exhibition, In and Out of Love, staged in 1991 at the Woodstock Street Gallery, London. His earliest butterfly paintings—monochrome canvases adorned with insects as in the present work—hung in the downstairs gallery space, while the upper floor became a theatre for the cycle of life, as butterfly pupae glued to white canvases hatched, matured, and died within the confines of the gallery’s white walls. At the time, Hirst didn’t have a studio and had been breeding butterflies in his bedroom. With this exhibition, art and life could evolve within the gallery space itself, which became both studio and vitrine.
Underlying Hirst’s entire oeuvre is the artist’s well-chronicled obsession with mortality. ‘I am going to die and I want to live forever,’ he writes, ‘I can’t escape the fact, and I can’t let go of the desire’ (D. Hirst quoted in Romance in the Age of Uncertainty, exh. cat. White Cube, London 2003, p. 7). Throughout his infamous ‘Natural History’ series, medicine cabinets and canvases, Hirst adopts the theme of preservation as a means of dissecting the thin line between life and death. The final, mature stage of a butterfly’s lifecycle, known as the ‘imago,’ translates from Latin as ‘image’. Preserved upon a clear, glossy sky, in A Summers Day the butterflies reveal the essential joy and beauty of life as richer, not poorer, for all its brevity and inevitable conclusion.
Hirst’s fascination with the butterfly motif stems from the universal significance of these fragile, beautiful creatures. ‘You have to find universal triggers,’ Hirst explains. ‘Everyone’s frightened of glass, everyone’s frightened of sharks, everyone loves butterflies’ (D. Hirst quoted in A. Dannatt, ‘Damien Hirst: Life’s like this, then it stops’, Flash Art, No. 169, March–April 1993). Hirst first used butterflies in his debut solo exhibition, In and Out of Love, staged in 1991 at the Woodstock Street Gallery, London. His earliest butterfly paintings—monochrome canvases adorned with insects as in the present work—hung in the downstairs gallery space, while the upper floor became a theatre for the cycle of life, as butterfly pupae glued to white canvases hatched, matured, and died within the confines of the gallery’s white walls. At the time, Hirst didn’t have a studio and had been breeding butterflies in his bedroom. With this exhibition, art and life could evolve within the gallery space itself, which became both studio and vitrine.
Underlying Hirst’s entire oeuvre is the artist’s well-chronicled obsession with mortality. ‘I am going to die and I want to live forever,’ he writes, ‘I can’t escape the fact, and I can’t let go of the desire’ (D. Hirst quoted in Romance in the Age of Uncertainty, exh. cat. White Cube, London 2003, p. 7). Throughout his infamous ‘Natural History’ series, medicine cabinets and canvases, Hirst adopts the theme of preservation as a means of dissecting the thin line between life and death. The final, mature stage of a butterfly’s lifecycle, known as the ‘imago,’ translates from Latin as ‘image’. Preserved upon a clear, glossy sky, in A Summers Day the butterflies reveal the essential joy and beauty of life as richer, not poorer, for all its brevity and inevitable conclusion.