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Lot Essay
'I've always seen medicine cabinets as bodies, but also like a cityscape or civilization with some sort of hierarchy within it. It's also like a contemporary museum of the Middle Ages. In 100 years time this will look like an old apothecary. A museum of something that's around today' (D. Hirst quoted in D. Hirst, I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, London 2005, p. 229).
An acrylic cupboard is divided into five shelves, each contains surgical clothing - everything a doctor would need to perform surgery in a hygienic and controlled manner. In No Love Lost, Damien Hirst presents neatly folded gowns, stacked rows of identical, pristinely white shoes and precisely arranged boxes of medical masks. The work is presented in a minimal fashion with an exact ordering of form that reflects the aesthetic concerns of Minimalism, akin to Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd, emitting a sense of order in an otherwise chaotic world. Created in 2008, the work extends from Hirst’s early medicine cabinets series that first began with Sinner – a collection of his grandmother’s medication in an MDF cabinet – in 1988. Hirst has shown a sustained interest in the themes of life and death as well as a firm belief in the salutary power of art. The artist has long been preoccupied with what he terms ‘the two most important things, where we came from and where we are going’ (D. Hirst, quoted M. D’Argenzio (ed.), ‘Like People, Like Flies: Damien Hirst Interviewed’, The Agony and the Ecstasy: Selected Works from 1989 – 2004, exh. cat., Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples, 2004, p. 113).
The work touches upon many of Hirst’s key concerns: medicine, death, life, reality, art and its curative powers, while also having its own striking aesthetic presence through the stacking of objects and the subtle balancing of white, blue and green hues. In the earlier medicine cabinets, Hirst expressed the fragility of the human body in contrast to the remarkable power of 20th century pills, lotions and drugs to prolong life. In the present work, by depicting the costume of surgery, through the empty but soon-to-be filled boots, Hirst stresses the human presence in life-saving operations, reminding us that it is the human brain which invented such medicines and can execute advanced surgery. The equipment is ready and waiting, still and suspended, until called into dramatic action at the moment of the surgical procedure, when life could hang in the balance. An example of Hirst’s discussion of the cycle of life through his recognisable minimal and conceptual means, No Love Lost is ultimately symbolic of the hope humanity places in the potential of modern medicine and surgery.
An acrylic cupboard is divided into five shelves, each contains surgical clothing - everything a doctor would need to perform surgery in a hygienic and controlled manner. In No Love Lost, Damien Hirst presents neatly folded gowns, stacked rows of identical, pristinely white shoes and precisely arranged boxes of medical masks. The work is presented in a minimal fashion with an exact ordering of form that reflects the aesthetic concerns of Minimalism, akin to Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd, emitting a sense of order in an otherwise chaotic world. Created in 2008, the work extends from Hirst’s early medicine cabinets series that first began with Sinner – a collection of his grandmother’s medication in an MDF cabinet – in 1988. Hirst has shown a sustained interest in the themes of life and death as well as a firm belief in the salutary power of art. The artist has long been preoccupied with what he terms ‘the two most important things, where we came from and where we are going’ (D. Hirst, quoted M. D’Argenzio (ed.), ‘Like People, Like Flies: Damien Hirst Interviewed’, The Agony and the Ecstasy: Selected Works from 1989 – 2004, exh. cat., Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples, 2004, p. 113).
The work touches upon many of Hirst’s key concerns: medicine, death, life, reality, art and its curative powers, while also having its own striking aesthetic presence through the stacking of objects and the subtle balancing of white, blue and green hues. In the earlier medicine cabinets, Hirst expressed the fragility of the human body in contrast to the remarkable power of 20th century pills, lotions and drugs to prolong life. In the present work, by depicting the costume of surgery, through the empty but soon-to-be filled boots, Hirst stresses the human presence in life-saving operations, reminding us that it is the human brain which invented such medicines and can execute advanced surgery. The equipment is ready and waiting, still and suspended, until called into dramatic action at the moment of the surgical procedure, when life could hang in the balance. An example of Hirst’s discussion of the cycle of life through his recognisable minimal and conceptual means, No Love Lost is ultimately symbolic of the hope humanity places in the potential of modern medicine and surgery.