On His Majesty's Service

After graduating from Leeds College of Art in the early 1980s, Hirst moved to London to focus on his application to Goldsmiths College. However, whilst living with a fellow artist in White Hart Lane, Hirst found himself in a creative rut. In his own words, he would get ‘stuck – not because [he] couldn’t think of anything to paint, but because there was too much possibility’ (The Guardian, 1 February 2018). Hirst became intrigued by the behaviours of his next-door neighbour, an old man who, it became apparent, had a tendency for hoarding. After living next door for a month or so, Hirst stopped hearing the usual muffled activity from his neighbour. Worried, he and his friend broke into the house to check on the old man. It turned out to be the home of an eccentric ex-policeman, Mr Barnes, who had spent over sixty years collating an intriguing collection of found objects, in a couple of rooms on the top floor. This discovery served as the powerful source of inspiration that the artist had been searching for. With overtones of Kurt Schwitters and Hannah Hoch, On His Majesty’s Service, 1983, is one of the most successful pieces from the subsequent body of work, which consisted mostly of collages created with material from Mr Barnes’ idiosyncratic collection. Expanded from Small Red Wheel, another piece from this series, was formerly in the collection of the artist Robert Rauschenberg.

The present work made headlines when it was illustrated incorrectly in the catalogue for Hirst’s eponymous retrospective exhibition at Tate Modern in 2012. Noticing that On His Majesty’s Service was illustrated vertically instead of horizontally on page 209, he demanded a complete re-print of the catalogue, testament to the resonance that this formative body of work still has with the artist himself.