R10,000
Damien Hirst (English 1965 - ) VALLEY OF DEATH, 2010
six-colour gravure print
68,5 by 68,5cm; 78,5 by 78,5 by 4,5cm including framing
The butterfly in the art of Damien Hirst
I always say my work is about life, but I don’t know, I suppose it does dwell on the dark side – Damien Hirst
Hirst’s use of the butterfly in his artworks draws and expands upon the shared cultural meaning that these creatures symbolise in the human psyche. Light, beautiful, ephemeral, butterflies have caught the imagination of human beings throughout time. Representative of the human soul for the ancient Greeks and Chinese Daoists, the butterfly later became a symbol of the resurrection of Christ and an icon for the possibility of regeneration and renewal. By the 17th century, the changes brought about by early capitalism and the dawning industrial revolution saw artworks such as Vanitas Still Life, by Dutch artist Maria van Oosterwijck, and Gainsborough’s The Painter’s daughters Chasing a Butterfly, introduce the butterfly as a cautionary symbol. The 20th century saw the butterfly take on yet another layer of symbolic meaning. Amid the harsh realities of a post-World War II world, a brutal take on the seemingly innocent Victorian-era hobby of butterfly collecting saw controversial French artist Jean Dubuffet using the ripped-off wings of butterflies in his artworks. Critics were scathing, but the notion of the butterfly as symbolic ‘harbingers of disaster’ appeared to take root.
The work of Damien Hirst incorporates and expands on all these themes, bringing them very much into the 21st century. Hirst uses butterflies to explore the borderlands between life and death, religion and science, beauty and horror. His first controversial solo exhibition, In and Out of Love, was followed in 2006 by I am Become Death, Shatterer of Worlds, an epic work of two thousand seven hundred pairs of real butterfly wings arranged in an explosion of colour reminiscent both of cathedral stain-glass windows and the awe-full beauty of an atomic detonation.
The work on offer here, lot 526 is a section of Hirst’s kaleidoscopic black butterfly-patterned wallpaper created from his painting Valley of Death, executed in 2010. Hirst’s 2021 Relics and Fly Painting exhibition at Gagosian’s Britannia Gallery saw the interior walls of the exhibition space clad floor to ceiling with this wallpaper. In its complexity of overlapping black butterfly wings with highlights of iridescent blue, it is at once dark and transcendent – a masterful balance of Hirst’s major themes.
“Damien Hirst is an artist whose incredible gift has been to find deep poetry and philosophy for the way we live our lives in the most direct re-workings of pre-existing objects and media. As he himself has declared, ‘I think I’ve got an obsession with death, but I think it’s like a celebration of life rather than something morbid. You can’t have one without the other.’” (Hirst & Burn, pg 21)
J.J.
White, Katie, A Brief, Fluttering History of Butterflies in Art, From Symbols of Regeneration to Reminders of the Fleetingness of Life, March 18, 2022
news.artnet.com/art-world/a-history-of-butterflies-in-art-2085638 accessed 30 May 2022
Matthew Wilson, Butterflies: The Ultimate Icon of our Fragility, September 2021
bbc.com/culture/article/20210915-butterflies-the-ultimate-icon-of-our-fragility accessed 30 May 2022
Christies, lot essay, October 2010
christies.com/en/lot/lot-5363059
Patrick Barkham, Damien Hirst’s Butterflies: Distressing but Weirdly Uplifting
theguardian.com/environment/2012/apr/18/damien-hirst-butterflies-weirdly-uplifting accessed 20 May 2022
Hirst D, and Burn G , On the Way to Work, London: Faber and Faber, 2001
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