“So I’ve always been drawn to series and pairs. A unique thing is quite a frightening object.” DAMIEN HIRST

Composed of two equal sized canvases pasted with household gloss paint onto which dead butterflies are suspended, Night Follows Day epitomizes the challenging and direct style of its canonical maker Damien Hirst.

Having first achieved recognition in 1988 for his conception of Freeze, an exhibition in a disused warehouse which showed his work and that of his friends and fellow students at Goldsmiths College, Hirst has since gone on to become one of the most influential artists of his generation, winning numerous accolades and featuring in exhibitions worldwide. Most notably he was awarded the Turner prize in 1995 for the work Mother and Child Divided and in 2011 he was the focus of a retrospective at the Tate Modern.

Throughout his career, the artist has examined the subject of death. In fact to Hirst, death is somewhat of a fixation: "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." Examining morality in a direct and challenging manner, Hirst’s works are both poignant and highly unsettling, bringing viewers to ponder life’s temporality and purpose. Little wonder then that alongside being one of Britain’s most noted artists, he is also one of the most controversial.

Since his early 1991 work In and Out of Love (in which an entire room in disused Travel Agents, filled with hundreds of tropical butterflies, which were left to hatch eat and mate before eventually dying) butterflies have been a central feature of Hirst’s oeuvre, appearing in numerous works of the artist’s pieces in a plethora of manners.
Hirst’s use of butterflies hold a number of rich connotations. When describing the significance of In Out of Love the artist stated, "It was about love, kind of whether love existed or something like that. Upstairs... the white paintings were like: this is real love, it is like butterflies flying around in a good environment but inside there is no colour... When I went downstairs, I said that I wanted this to look like it was alive at one time. I want it to look like an artists studio where he had coloured canvases wet and the butterflies had landed in them... This idea of an artist trying to make a monochrome and being fucked up by flies landing in the paint... Then you get the beauty of the butterfly, but it is actually something horrible... The death of an insect that still has this really optimistic beauty of a wonderful thing."

Indeed with their fragile natures and short life spans, Hirst’s butterflies direct viewers to consider life’s fragility. At the same time, these insects also recall birthday cards, the Victorian pursuit of Lepidopterists (which is the collection of butterflies) and spirituality, for in many cultures the butterfly is symbolic of the soul.

In Night Follows Day, allusions to morality and spirituality are particularly prominent. The oppositional relationship between the blue and white of the canvases holds ties to Hirst’s understanding that opposites - in particular oppositional colours - are emblematic of life and death. As the artist himself explains, “I’ve always been interested in the split between mind and body, the one and the other, the difference between art and life, life and death, like black and white... I think of life and death as black and white. If life is white, black is death. Trying to explain or imagine death is like trying to imagine black by only using white. There’s no way you can get to it, it’s like the same thing but opposite. This is life and death isn’t.” (A. Dannatt, 'Damien Hirst: Life’s like this, then it stops', Flash Art, no.169, March-April 1993, p.63) Meanwhile, the diptych nature of the work holds similarities to an altarpiece, thus further stressing the pieces ties to religious symbolism.

Through its rich and complex symbolism Night Follows Day exemplifies Hirst’s masterly skill at drawing upon rich cultural associations to create startling and thought-provoking works. On this count the work stands as a striking exempla of the artist’s force and talent.

“I wanted this to look like it was alive at one time. I want it to look like an artists studio where he had coloured canvases wet and the butterflies had landed in them... This idea of an artist trying to make a monochrome and it being fucked up by flies landing in the paint...” DAMIEN HIRST