Provenance
Haunch of Venison, London
Catalogue Essay

Art is like medicine – it can heal. Yet I’ve always been amazed at how many people believe in medicine but don’t believe in art, without questioning either. D. Hirst, i want to spend the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always, forever, now, London, 1997, p. 246
The current lot is an impressive example of Damien Hirst’s paintings of spots from the ‘Pharmaceutical Paintings’ series. On a superficial level, the painting has a playful quality with its multi-colored dots, but upon closer observation, one realizes the subversive subject matter underpinned by the chemical compound title. The work serves as a critique of our overmedicated society and the unregulated dispersal of pharmaceutical prescriptions.
4-Fluoro-3-Nitrotoluene’s visual pleasure rises out of the several hundred uniquely colored spots that are arranged in a geometric grid, equidistant from one another. The pattern implies order, but when inspecting the colors closely, one realizes that no two spots are the same pigment. Each differs slightly creating a dizzying effect that plays with one’s eyes and generates an underlying sensation of chaos. “If you look closely at one of these paintings a strange thing happens: because of the lack of repeated colors there is no harmony.We are used to picking out chords of the same color and balancing them with different chords of other colours to create meaning.This can’t happen. So in every painting there is subliminal sense of unease; yet the colours project so much joy it’s hard to feel it, but it’sthere,” (Ibid).
The dots trick the eye and make it difficult to focus on one color. Each circle is arranged in carefully measured rows and columns. The painting almost appears computer generated. The hand behind the creation of this painting is disguised behind the machine-like quality of the work. Hirst was quoted saying, “I like the way the paintings look like they could have been made by a big machine – the machine being the artist in the future,” (Ibid).
4-Fluoro-3-Nitrotoluene is part of an endless series of paintings. The various possibilities of colored dot combinations on Hirst’s canvases metaphorically stand for the infinite chemical compounds that exist in the medical field. Hirst describes the series as, “a scientific approach to painting in a similar way to the drug companies’ scientific approach to life,” (Ibid).
Prior to, and during the same period that Hirst was creating his spot paintings, he was developing another unique body of work that closely relates to the subject of medicine. This work was his medicine cabinet series, which he stocked with prescription drugs. These cabinets appear as if they were taken directly out of a person’s bathroom and prepped for exhibition. It is evident that the installation of the drugs in each of his medicine cabinets helped lay the foundation for Hirst’s compositional constructions and his close attention to order, as seen in the present lot. This organizational inclination is visible in other work by Hirst, such as the cigarette butts organized on shelves and the cast hand-painted pills in stainless steel cabinets. Each individual object, whether it is the cigarette, the pill, or the spot, acts as an accessory to the greater composition, therefore rendering them totally equal and void of specific importance, while still assuring them as completely essential to the entire work. In 4-Fluoro-3-Nitrotoluene, the contained dots come together to form the work’s compositional whole.
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.
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22

Damien Hirst

4-Fluoro-3-Nitrotoluene

2006

Gloss household paint on canvas.
49 x 47 in. (124.5 x 119.4 cm).

Signed, titled, and dated “Damien Hirst 4-Fluoro-3-Nitrotoluene 2006” on the reverse; signed “D. Hirst” on the stretcher.

Estimate
$1,000,000 - 1,500,000

Contemporary Art Part I

13 Nov 2008, 7pm
New York

1
Rachel Harrison
Marlon and Indian
Estimate $70,000 - 90,000
Sold for $62,500
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2
Terence Koh
The Road to the Winterland of My Discontent, I Know Not Where I Lead
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3
Wade Guyton
Untitled
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4
Christopher Wool
Untitled (P489)
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5
Matthew Barney
Cremaster 3: Imperial Demolition
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6
Richard Prince
Untitled (Tire Planter)
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7
Kendell Geers
The Fall
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8
Richard Prince
Untitled (Protest Painting)
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9
Mark Grotjahn
Untitled
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10
Dan Flavin
Untitled (for Prudence and her new baby) a
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11
Mark Grotjahn
Untitled (Orange Butterfly)
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12
Donald Judd
Untitled (87-23 STUDER AG)
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13
Robert Indiana
Four Diamond Peace (Blue)
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14
Anish Kapoor
Untitled (Mirror)
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15
Donald Judd
Untitled (77/23 - Bernstein)
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16
Ugo Rondinone
Vierzehnterjunineunzehnhundertneunundneunzig
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17
Damien Hirst
Beautiful Artemis Thor Neptune Odin Delusional Sapphic Inspirational Hypnosis Painting
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18
Damien Hirst
Happy Head No. 7
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19
Anselm Reyle
Untitled
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20
Yoshitomo Nara
Winter Long
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21
Takashi Murakami
Eye Love SUPERFLAT
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22
Damien Hirst
4-Fluoro-3-Nitrotoluene
Estimate $1,000,000 - 1,500,000
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23
Andreas Gursky
Säulenheilige
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24
John Currin
Standing Nude
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25
Cindy Sherman
Untitled #212
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26
Kiki Smith
Untitled (Roses)
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27
Richard Artschwager
Untitled (Splatter Desk, Chair, Typewriter)
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28
David Salle
Rips in the Mirror
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29
John Chamberlain
BAMBOOZLEDCLARITY
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30
Jean-Michel Basquiat
J.D. CARD
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31
Roy Lichtenstein
Mobile
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32
Tom Wesselmann
Study for Great American Nude # 75
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33
Robert Indiana
Norma Jean Loved
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Andy Warhol
$
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35
Frank Stella
Brazilian Merganser
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36
Andy Warhol
Details of Renaissance Paintings (Paolo Uccello, St. George and the Dragon, 1460)
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37
Andy Warhol
Portrait of R. C. Gorman
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38
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Thirty-Sixth Figure
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39
John Chamberlain
Untitled
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40
Gary Hume
Into the Dangerous World...
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41
Albert Oehlen
Grazie
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42
Anselm Kiefer
Dein Hausritt die Finstere Welle
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43
Thomas Struth
Paradise 6
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44
Isa Genzken
Untitled
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45
Dirk Skreber
Untitled (Train)
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46
Thomas Schütte
Wicht
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47
George Condo
Big Game Hunter
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48
Yoshitomo Nara
Crated Room #4
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49
Francesco Vezzoli
La Devoradora (Evil Woman)
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50
Subodh Gupta
Magic Wands 6
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51
John McCracken
Bit
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52
Tom Friedman
Untitled
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Gert and Uwe Tobias
Untitled
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54
Piotr Uklański
Untitled (Agnes)
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55
Konrad Klapheck
Das Verhängnis (Fate)
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56
Florian Maier-Aichen
Untitled
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Contemporary Art Part I

13 Nov 2008, 7pm New York

Create your first list.

Provenance

Catalogue Essay

Artist Biography

Damien Hirst

22

Damien Hirst

4-Fluoro-3-Nitrotoluene

Contemporary Art Part I

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13 Nov 2008, 7pm
New York