Damien Hirst - Contemporary Art Day Sale London Monday, June 29, 2015 | Phillips
  • Provenance

    Private Collection

  • Catalogue Essay

    "When you see a finished art work, it is like the art work sort of presents what it is trying to do. You can see the rules of construction. Sometimes it is very difficult as an artist to see it, because you can’t help lying to yourself, but it is very easy for the viewer to see what the artist is trying to do and notice whether they achieved it or not." DAMIEN HIRST

  • Artist Biography

    Damien Hirst

    British • 1965

    There is no other contemporary artist as maverick to the art market as Damien Hirst. Foremost among the Young British Artists (YBAs), a group of provocative artists who graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London in the late 1980s, Hirst ascended to stardom by making objects that shocked and appalled, and that possessed conceptual depth in both profound and prankish ways.

    Regarded as Britain's most notorious living artist, Hirst has studded human skulls in diamonds and submerged sharks, sheep and other dead animals in custom vitrines of formaldehyde. In tandem with Cheyenne Westphal, now Chairman of Phillips, Hirst controversially staged an entire exhibition directly for auction with 2008's "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever," which collectively totalled £111 million ($198 million).

    Hirst remains genre-defying and creates everything from sculpture, prints, works on paper and paintings to installation and objects. Another of his most celebrated series, the 'Pill Cabinets' present rows of intricate pills, cast individually in metal, plaster and resin, in sterilized glass and steel containers; Phillips New York showed the largest of these pieces ever exhibited in the United States, The Void, 2000, in May 2017.

    View More Works

134

Beautiful, beautiful, charity childrens, spin painting (with butterflies)

2007
butterflies on household gloss on canvas, in artist's acrylic glass frame
diameter 182.9 cm (72 in.)
Signed and dated '2007 Damien Hirst' on the reverse. Further signed 'Damien Hirst' on the stretcher.

Estimate
£250,000 - 350,000 ‡♠

Sold for £290,500

Contact Specialist
Henry Highley
Head of Sale
hhighley@phillips.com
+ 44 20 7318 4061

Contemporary Art Day Sale

London Auction 30 June 2015 2pm