As rhythmic, radial waves of electric blue, yellow, and crimson punctuate the sparkling black ground, Entreaty embodies Damien Hirst’s perpetual engagement with the universal and inevitable conclusion of human experience: death. Butterflies first emerged in the artist’s practice in 1991 when he graduated from Goldsmiths and, after being unable to secure a gallery, held his first solo exhibition in a vacant travel agent on Woodstock Street in London. Titled In and Out of Love, the exhibition was arranged across two floors. The ground floor comprised a humid, greenhouse-like environment with five white canvases on the walls to which butterfly pupae were attached. Here, amongst flowering plants and bowls of sugar, the newly born butterflies fluttered around the room, embodying beauty and the vitality of life. Nonetheless, in the basement below, eight glossy, vibrant canvases lined the walls with the limp carcasses of dead butterflies pressed into their surfaces. Here, as in countless artworks since, Hirst harnessed the butterflies’ mesmerising beauty and brief lifespan to foreground the transience of life and the universal presence of death.
“I think rather than be personal you have to find universal triggers: everyone's frightened of glass, everyone's frightened of sharks, everyone loves butterflies.”
—Damien HirstThrough the butterfly, Hirst reflects on universal conditions that bind our present alongside the past. As Hirst explained, the 1991 installation was “about love and realism […] life and death” and the dichotomy of “butterflies still being beautiful even when dead”. Much like the vicissitudes of life and love, butterflies symbolically and metaphysically embody the cruel paradoxes of human existence, combining immortal beauty and the frailty of physical reality through their fragile gossamer wings. The butterflies, with their jewel-like luminosity and iridescence, offer a hopeful counterpoint to Hirst’s bleaker artistic considerations of life, such as his infamous 1990 work entitled A Thousand Years, which utilised a severed cow's head and maggots to engage with themes of life, death and decay.
Interior of the rose, Strasbourg Cathedral. Image: wikicommons Hirst’s exploration of mortality is aligned simultaneously to religiosity: a spiritualism that eludes rigid categorisation. Adopting the appearance of delicate stained glass, in its luminosity and radial arrangement, Entreaty takes on the appearance of the kind of Gothic rose windows discovered in the most spectacular cathedrals of Europe – a point directly referenced in the titles of some of the butterfly works. Yet, rather than being purely rooted in the Christian belief system, Hirst considers universal religious and spiritual symbolism. In Eastern religious traditions, the circular mandala can symbolise the cosmos, while aiding meditation by directing the observer inwards. The mimetic butterfly wing has a similar effect, guiding the onlooker to the centre of the composition, encouraging inner reflection and conjuring worlds beyond.
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.
25
Entreaty
2013
Screenprint in colours with glitter, on Somerset paper, with full margins.
I. 122 cm (48 in.) diameter
S. 145.3 x 142 cm (57 1/4 x 55 7/8 in.)
Signed and numbered 25/25 in pencil (there were also 5 artist's proofs), published by Other Criteria, London (with their and the artist's blindstamps), framed.
Estimate
£15,000 - 20,000 ♠
Sold for £27,940
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Damien Hirst: Online Auction
17 - 25 October 2024
