Damien Hirst’s meteoric career examines the poignant statement embodied in the co-existence of life and death. Through his immediate and spectacular visual language, which ranges from decaying livestock and formaldehyde-dipped animals to vivid dot paintings and harmonic butterfly canvases, the artist addresses the highest expression of the fragility of life and the reluctance to confront death. The transition from life to form is central to Hirst’s poetics, exemplified in his presentation of tragic beauty as agent of death. From his first solo exhibition, of 1991, ‘In and Out of Love’, Hirst introduced the themes of ephemerality and death, which since then have been the polarities which feed his transgressive artistic production. Shortly after his graduation from Goldsmiths in 1989, Hirst began to work on a series of paintings taking inspiration from seeing flies that had become stuck on primed canvases in his Brixton work space. Taking this idea a step further, Hirst started fixing bodies of dead butterflies to monochrome gloss-painted canvases. When Tamara Chozdko organised the exhibition ‘In and Out of Love’ in an ex-travel agent’s office in Woodstock Street, London, the exhibition was comprised of two works exhibited on separate levels. The first, In and Out of Love (White Paintings and Live Butterflies), consisted of a live ecosystem, an artificial humid universe in which eight bare canvases were displayed at street level. Pupae of Malaysian butterflies were literally glued to the white canvases and hatched during the course of the exhibition, leaving butterflies to fly freely around the room until they eventually died. The second work, In and Out of Love (Butterfly Paintings and Ashtrays) constitutes Hirst’s first butterflies painting and was exhibited in the basement of the building. Eight monochrome paintings covered in bright household gloss described by the artist as “solid fucking gloss-paint horror” were embedded with dead butterflies alongside filled ashtrays with cigarette butts on a table. The brief fight of the butterflies upstairs and the cigarette butts in the ashtrays downstairs, all images of passing time, implied Hirst’s early interest in the mechanics of death and the cruel agony present in the inescapable ending of life.

Created between 2008 and 2009, the refined and poetic Lucy is emblematic of Hirst’s single- panel butterfly monochromes. The exotic butterflies are affixed across the canvas against a saturated red background suggesting passion and love. The present lot is a vivid example of one of most definitive themes in Hirst’s artistic production: a dialogue between birth and death, beauty and cruelty; decisive identities that lie at the very core of existence and irrefutable poles in the artist’s theatrical style. Hirst’s appeal for butterflies is shaped by the seemingly life-like appearance in death. Regarding his source of inspiration for ‘In and Out of Love’ installation Hirst explained: “I worked out many possible trajectories for these things, like the way the real butterfly can destroy the ideal (birthday-card) kind of love; the symbol exists apart from the real thing. Or the butterflies still being beautiful even when dead.” (Damien Hirst & Sophie Calle:Internal Affairs (Jay Jopling/ICA, 1991))

The butterfly as a symbol of love and life is undermined in these works as the viewer is brutally confronted with the inescapable reality of death. The tragic beauty embodied in the butterfly emblem captures the seemingly physical presence of life retained in his sumptuous dead forms. The inescapable tension between the deep red monotone background and the exquisite diaspora of extravagant butterflies across the canvas magnifies the vanity implied in beauty. Loaded with bipolar symbols of life and death, splendour and decay, beauty and horror, fragility and preservation, Lucy constitutes Hirst’s tribute to the eternal circle of life and death; “when you get too deep into the darkness, you need to move it towards the light. The butterflies were a good way to get away”.