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Lot Essay
‘I can’t understand why some people believe completely in medicine and not in art, without questioning either’ (Damien Hirst)
With its line-up of boxed and bottled medicaments arranged in neat rows within a glass-fronted cabinet, Damien Hirst’s Never Mind (1990-1991) is among the earliest of the artist’s celebrated Medicine Cabinets. Its title alludes to the 1977 Sex Pistols’ album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, ironically juxtaposing a precise, clinical sense of order with the iconic punk band’s rallying cry for chaos. Never Mind belongs to a group of Medicine Cabinets known as the ‘B-sides’, executed after an initial suite of twelve cabinets whose titles each corresponded to one of the album’s tracks: examples from that series include Pretty Vacant, now in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and E.M.I., in Munich’s Museum Brandhorst. A year later Hirst would take this seminal motif to thrilling new heights with Pharmacy, an installation now in the collection of Tate, London.
Following the breakout group show Freeze that Hirst organised along with other Goldsmiths College art students in 1988, Hirst rose to fame in the early 1990s as the enfant terrible of the Young British Artists. His works of this period—including the Spot Paintings and the Natural History vitrines, which featured animals preserved in formaldehyde—have become some of the most iconic in modern art. As with those series, the Medicine Cabinets set out a theme which would endure through Hirst’s entire oeuvre: that of the relationship of art to religion, science, life, and death. ‘I’ve always loved the idea of art maybe, you know, curing people,’ Hirst explains. ‘And I have this kind of obsession with the body’ (D. Hirst quoted in A. Danto, ‘Damien Hirst’s Medicine Cabinets: Art, Death, Sex, Society and Drugs’ in Damien Hirst. The Complete Medicine Cabinets, exh. cat., L&M Arts, New York, 2010, p. 7). The earliest Medicine Cabinets were filled with pharmaceutical packaging given to Hirst by his grandmother, shortly before she passed away. Hirst sometimes arranged the bottles and boxes of pills and potions according to their purpose, with medications for the head placed on the upper shelf, and those for the remainder of the body arranged in descending order. A poignant memento mori, Hirst’s depleted prescription medications become a record of life, and the ways in which the body is sustained.
Finding a precedent in Andy Warhol’s iconic Brillo boxes and Jeff Koons’s series of ‘new’ consumer products, the Medicine Cabinets combined the Duchampian tradition of the readymade with a postmodern elimination of the line between art and everyday life. Hirst played with the idea of legibility, intrigued at the thought that medical professionals might seek meaning in their arrangement, while others would find their labels—laden with complex chemical compounds—impenetrable. They play, too, with the language of Minimalism, recalling the clean lines of Sol LeWitt or Donald Judd. But the Medicine Cabinets complicated both the modernist grid and Pop’s slick veneer, their carefully-arranged contents a record of something distinctly human.
Hirst saw the pharmacy as akin to a place of worship, with the sick turning to modern medicine for salvation as they once prayed to the gods. With Never Mind, he erects a pantheon of drugs contained, votive-like, within a vitrine. Simultaneously, he contrasts society’s unfailing faith in medicine against the incredulity and scorn so often expressed towards contemporary art. Juxtaposing different systems of belief, Never Mind binds together threads of religion, medicine, and art.
Hirst’s fascination with death, which looms inevitably over life, underlies his entire oeuvre. ‘I’d always thought about death since I was seven years old ... and every day I think about it, it’s different. It goes from being impossible to the only thing. I remember thinking that, in a way, it’s what gives life beauty’ (D. Hirst quoted in Damien Hirst: Relics, exh. cat. Qatar Museums Authority, Doha 2013, p. 29). Anticipating his later works, from the Natural History series of animals preserved in formaldehyde to the meticulous pill cabinets and the gossamer butterflies which adorn bright, monochrome canvases, Hirst’s early Medicine Cabinets offer a meditation on the fragile line between life and death. ‘I think the thing that is forgotten is that we are going to die ... They can only heal you for a minute,’ he muses (D. Hirst quoted in A. Danto, ibid., p. 8). Never Mind, conversely, offers a profound meditation on the healing power of art.
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).
With its line-up of boxed and bottled medicaments arranged in neat rows within a glass-fronted cabinet, Damien Hirst’s Never Mind (1990-1991) is among the earliest of the artist’s celebrated Medicine Cabinets. Its title alludes to the 1977 Sex Pistols’ album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, ironically juxtaposing a precise, clinical sense of order with the iconic punk band’s rallying cry for chaos. Never Mind belongs to a group of Medicine Cabinets known as the ‘B-sides’, executed after an initial suite of twelve cabinets whose titles each corresponded to one of the album’s tracks: examples from that series include Pretty Vacant, now in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and E.M.I., in Munich’s Museum Brandhorst. A year later Hirst would take this seminal motif to thrilling new heights with Pharmacy, an installation now in the collection of Tate, London.
Following the breakout group show Freeze that Hirst organised along with other Goldsmiths College art students in 1988, Hirst rose to fame in the early 1990s as the enfant terrible of the Young British Artists. His works of this period—including the Spot Paintings and the Natural History vitrines, which featured animals preserved in formaldehyde—have become some of the most iconic in modern art. As with those series, the Medicine Cabinets set out a theme which would endure through Hirst’s entire oeuvre: that of the relationship of art to religion, science, life, and death. ‘I’ve always loved the idea of art maybe, you know, curing people,’ Hirst explains. ‘And I have this kind of obsession with the body’ (D. Hirst quoted in A. Danto, ‘Damien Hirst’s Medicine Cabinets: Art, Death, Sex, Society and Drugs’ in Damien Hirst. The Complete Medicine Cabinets, exh. cat., L&M Arts, New York, 2010, p. 7). The earliest Medicine Cabinets were filled with pharmaceutical packaging given to Hirst by his grandmother, shortly before she passed away. Hirst sometimes arranged the bottles and boxes of pills and potions according to their purpose, with medications for the head placed on the upper shelf, and those for the remainder of the body arranged in descending order. A poignant memento mori, Hirst’s depleted prescription medications become a record of life, and the ways in which the body is sustained.
Finding a precedent in Andy Warhol’s iconic Brillo boxes and Jeff Koons’s series of ‘new’ consumer products, the Medicine Cabinets combined the Duchampian tradition of the readymade with a postmodern elimination of the line between art and everyday life. Hirst played with the idea of legibility, intrigued at the thought that medical professionals might seek meaning in their arrangement, while others would find their labels—laden with complex chemical compounds—impenetrable. They play, too, with the language of Minimalism, recalling the clean lines of Sol LeWitt or Donald Judd. But the Medicine Cabinets complicated both the modernist grid and Pop’s slick veneer, their carefully-arranged contents a record of something distinctly human.
Hirst saw the pharmacy as akin to a place of worship, with the sick turning to modern medicine for salvation as they once prayed to the gods. With Never Mind, he erects a pantheon of drugs contained, votive-like, within a vitrine. Simultaneously, he contrasts society’s unfailing faith in medicine against the incredulity and scorn so often expressed towards contemporary art. Juxtaposing different systems of belief, Never Mind binds together threads of religion, medicine, and art.
Hirst’s fascination with death, which looms inevitably over life, underlies his entire oeuvre. ‘I’d always thought about death since I was seven years old ... and every day I think about it, it’s different. It goes from being impossible to the only thing. I remember thinking that, in a way, it’s what gives life beauty’ (D. Hirst quoted in Damien Hirst: Relics, exh. cat. Qatar Museums Authority, Doha 2013, p. 29). Anticipating his later works, from the Natural History series of animals preserved in formaldehyde to the meticulous pill cabinets and the gossamer butterflies which adorn bright, monochrome canvases, Hirst’s early Medicine Cabinets offer a meditation on the fragile line between life and death. ‘I think the thing that is forgotten is that we are going to die ... They can only heal you for a minute,’ he muses (D. Hirst quoted in A. Danto, ibid., p. 8). Never Mind, conversely, offers a profound meditation on the healing power of art.
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).