Damien Hirst - Editions & Works on Paper New York Thursday, February 15, 2024 | Phillips
  • “Cherry Blossoms are about beauty and life and death. They’re extreme – there’s something hopeful yet hopeless about them. They’re art but taken from nature....Blossoms are optimistic and bright yet fragile, just like we are.”
    —Damien Hirst

     

    Damien Hirst’s eight-part series entitled The Virtues is inspired by Bushidō, the Japanese samurai code of ethics. In 1900, Nitobe Inazō published a book titled Bushidō: The Soul of Japan, which intended to explain the practice of Bushidō to western audiences. According to Nitobe, Bushidō literally translates to ‘Military-Knight-Ways’ and it is a set of rules that Japanese nobles were expected to maintain in their daily lives. This code is divided into eight virtues, which relate to various customs, such as the tea ceremony, and behaviors, such as tranquility in the face of danger. These Eight Virtues of Bushidō are Justice, Courage, Mercy, Politeness, Honesty, Honor, Loyalty, and Control, which form the individual titles of Hirst's acclaimed series.

    • Literature

      HENI Productions H9

    • Catalogue Essay

      Including: Justice; Courage; Mercy; Politeness; Honesty; Honour; Loyalty; and Control

    • 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

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The Virtues (H. 9)

2021
The complete series of eight laminated giclée prints in colors, flush-mounted to aluminum with metal strainers on the reverse (as issued).
all 47 1/4 x 37 3/4 in. (120 x 95.9 cm)
All signed in pencil and variously numbered (printed) on the labels affixed to the reverse, from the editions of varying sizes, published by HENI Editions, London.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$80,000 - 120,000 

Sold for $152,400

Editions & Works on Paper

New York Auction 15 February 2024