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Lot Essay
‘I just fucking hate death. He’s such a dumb guy’ (D. Hirst, quoted in ‘An Interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist’, in In the darkest hour there may be light. Works from the Damien Hirst murderme collection, Serpentine Gallery, London).
Having engaged in the rhetoric of conceptual and minimalist art for over two decades, in 2006 Damien Hirst made a dramatic return to painting. In A Half Skull, 2007-2008, we see the ghostly suggestion of a skull set upon a rich painterly blue background. Emerging from the darkness, the skull emerges and dissolves into the background, reflecting the fragility of human life, and continues the artist’s ongoing investigation into the universal themes of life, death, medicine, and religion.
The skull itself has become a key motif for Hirst, most famously in his piece For the Love of God, 2007, in which he covered a cast of an 18th century human skull in diamonds, commenting on death and transient material value. In A Half Skull, Hirst continues to look at these ideas, but in using oil paint, he also draws overt connections to key moments and ideas from the history of art. Evoking a wealth of references, the skull stands as traditional momento-mori, a potent reminder to the viewer that life itself is fleeting. Painted upon newspaper and laid on canvas, the shadow of newsprint visible through the brush marks echoes these theme, signifying the ephemeral nature of daily life.
A deeply personal Hirst explores his own situation and attitude to life in the present work commenting, 'The world gets darker as you get older. I'm 44 now and I did a massive amount of celebrating for 20 years. For a while there, I actually believed I was going to live forever, but having friends dying means you just have to accept you're not immortal. I can quietly express those things in paintings, but there was no way I could express that in a spin or a spot and it was starting to gnaw away at me. Maybe I'm having a midlife crisis, because all art should be a celebration of life in some way, a map of a man or a woman's life. Art is a great way to look at the darkness without having to look at it directly, because the real darkness is fucking unbearable' (D. Hirst, quoted in O. Ward, ‘Interview with Damien Hirst’, Time Out, October 2009, https://www.timeout.com/london/art/interview-with-damien-hirst [accessed 14 September 2014]).
Having engaged in the rhetoric of conceptual and minimalist art for over two decades, in 2006 Damien Hirst made a dramatic return to painting. In A Half Skull, 2007-2008, we see the ghostly suggestion of a skull set upon a rich painterly blue background. Emerging from the darkness, the skull emerges and dissolves into the background, reflecting the fragility of human life, and continues the artist’s ongoing investigation into the universal themes of life, death, medicine, and religion.
The skull itself has become a key motif for Hirst, most famously in his piece For the Love of God, 2007, in which he covered a cast of an 18th century human skull in diamonds, commenting on death and transient material value. In A Half Skull, Hirst continues to look at these ideas, but in using oil paint, he also draws overt connections to key moments and ideas from the history of art. Evoking a wealth of references, the skull stands as traditional momento-mori, a potent reminder to the viewer that life itself is fleeting. Painted upon newspaper and laid on canvas, the shadow of newsprint visible through the brush marks echoes these theme, signifying the ephemeral nature of daily life.
A deeply personal Hirst explores his own situation and attitude to life in the present work commenting, 'The world gets darker as you get older. I'm 44 now and I did a massive amount of celebrating for 20 years. For a while there, I actually believed I was going to live forever, but having friends dying means you just have to accept you're not immortal. I can quietly express those things in paintings, but there was no way I could express that in a spin or a spot and it was starting to gnaw away at me. Maybe I'm having a midlife crisis, because all art should be a celebration of life in some way, a map of a man or a woman's life. Art is a great way to look at the darkness without having to look at it directly, because the real darkness is fucking unbearable' (D. Hirst, quoted in O. Ward, ‘Interview with Damien Hirst’, Time Out, October 2009, https://www.timeout.com/london/art/interview-with-damien-hirst [accessed 14 September 2014]).