Damien Hirst - Contemporary Art Day Sale New York Friday, November 14, 2014 | Phillips

Contemporary Art Day Sale

New York Auction 14 November 2014 11am

  • Provenance

    Haunch of Venison, London/New York
    Private Collection
    Christie's, New York, Post War and Contemporary Afternoon Session, November 11, 2009, lot 394
    Galerie Thomas, Munich

  • Catalogue Essay

    “The Spin Paintings gather and amalgamate the individuality of every individual color, introducing a mechanical rotating movement at the moment of execution, to make the colors participate in a primordial state, where order and creation dissolve and disengage from the mediation of thought and representation, to become pure expression of the basic and vital gesture of painting and its mythology.”
    Damien Hirst, 2004

    Damien Hirst has solidified his position as the most widely maligned and critically acclaimed artist of the 20th century. Hirst’s output is prolific and diverse in its use of varied media and artistic techniques. Linking his varied works, however, is the consistent reference to and examination of the fundamental issue of human experience. His Spin Paintings, of which Beautiful House, Car and Two Point Four Kids Painting from 2005 is a superb example, are the culmination of all of his eccentricity and enthusiasm for his materials and the spontaneity and energy inherent in the creative process.

    By creating series of works, Hirst reflects on human’s desire to theoretically override death by the implication of endlessness and the sense of the infinite that comes with constant repetition. The Spin Paintings are a fantastic thread of his oeuvre which is almost completely oriented towards the celebration of life and technology, culture and the inherent beauty of things. Typically done in jubilant color palettes such as here with its whorls of lime green and fire-engine red, slashes of flamingo pink, and splashes of creamy yellows and blues Beautiful House, Car and Two Point Four Kids Painting seems literally to vibrate with its tonal energies.

    Inspired by childhood memories of seeing paintings made at school parties, Hirst began the series in the early 1990s. He completed his first work in 1992 and the following year set up a spin art stall with his fellow artist Angus Fairhurst at Joshua Compston’s artist-led street fair, A Fete Worse than Death. The title of this particular work with its allusion to a specific ideal consumerist, suburban middle class existence is at once self-referential and self-critical. Spin Paintings having always been the province of birthday parties and fairs reflect the happiness of these perfect nuclear families while at the same time, Hirst’s penchant for subverting the norm even while embracing it is put on full display. The viewer is left wondering whether Hirst truly embraces and identifies with or would rather skewer these families. And therein may lie the greatest spin of them all.

  • 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

163

Damien Hirst

Beautiful House, Car and Two Point Four Kids Painting

2005
household gloss on canvas
diameter 72 in. (182.9 cm)

Estimate
$450,000 - 550,000 

Contact Specialist
Kate Bryan
Head of Day Sale
New York
+ 1 212 940 1267

Contemporary Art Day Sale

New York Auction 14 November 2014 11am