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Lot Essay
'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' (D. Hirst quoted in The Agony and the Ecstasy: Selected Works from 1989 - 2004, exh. cat., Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples, 2004, p. 136)
‘The death of an insect … still has this really optimistic beauty of a wonderful thing’ (D. Hirst quoted in The Agony and the Ecstasy: Selected Works from 1989 - 2004, exh. cat., Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples, 2004, p. 83).
Elaborately opulent and breathtakingly monumental, stretching to over three metres in length, Purification is a magnificent example of Damien Hirst’s ambitious, audacious oeuvre. Executed in 2008, this work was created just as Hirst began to arrange his butterflies in ever-more complex permutations, the so-called ‘butterfly grids’, aligning their iridescent bodies into swirling circles, segmented stars and the arched, pointed forms of Gothic windows. In Purification, the gossamer-fine wings of a flight of scarlet insects are laid over an elliptical ground, preserved and imprisoned in a coat of crimson gloss. Their delicate shapes segment the canvas into an exquisite tracery of symmetric rays and concentric circles, culminating in a central vortex, in which a single dismembered butterfly presides. Intersecting the captivating beauty of the Baroque with the poignant death of hundreds of delicate insects, the artist creates an arresting meditation on mortality: ‘Death is one of those things,’ he explained. ‘To live in a society where you're trying not to look at it is stupid, because looking at death throws us back into life with more vigour and energy. The fact that flowers don't last for ever makes them beautiful’ (D. Hirst, quoted in E. Day, ‘Damien Hirst: 'Art is childish and childlike’’, The Observer, 26 September 2010).
Hirst’s works, not least among them the formaldehyde vitrines, medicines cabinets and diamond-encrusted skulls, are characterised by a deadpan directness, which belies even the most overblown of his creations, giving them a touchingly affecting innocence. The same fusion of dark comedy and futile tragedy lies in the conception of the butterfly paintings: ‘I remember painting something white once and flies landing on it, thinking “Fuck!” but then thinking it was funny. This idea of an artist trying to make a monochrome and being fucked up by flies landing in the paint or something like that. Then you get the beauty of the butterfly, but it is actually something horrible I have always liked that idea of something going wrong and something being created from it’ (D. Hirst quoted in The Agony and the Ecstasy: Selected Works from 1989 - 2004, exh. cat., Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples, 2004, p. 136)
Butterflies have been an important medium for Hirst since the earliest stages of his career, first appearing in the landmark 1991 installation In and Out of Love, where the artist transformed the interior of a London space into an exotic habitat, its walls hung with monochromatic works. As the artist recalls, ‘I had white painting with shelves on and the paintings had live pupae for butterflies glued on them. The pupae hatched from the paintings and flew around, so it was like an environment for butterflies …Then downstairs I had another table which had ashtrays on it and canvases with dead butterflies stuck in the paint. There were four boxes with holes in … which were supposed to look like boxes that the butterflies came from there and died in the paint’ (D. Hirst, quoted in Damien Hirst: The Agony and the Ecstasy, exh. cat., Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples, 2004, pp. 74-77).
The butterfly paintings evolved directly from this seminal work, their numbers multiplying and their colours fragmenting as Hirst’s appetite for more unusual and more striking specimens grew. Arranged on the surfaces of his works in decorative schemes which pay no heed to species, type, or origin, they recall the elaborate displays of Victorian conversation pieces. Hirst’s butterfly paintings are driven by the same acquisitive urge as cabinets of curiosities and museum vitrines, whose makers sought to rationalise the beauty of the natural world, to preserve its fascinating wonders forever, and thus to overcome human mortality. This eternal pursuit underlies the duality and symmetry of Purification: in the pairing of fragility and preservation, in the proximity of beauty and horror, in the juxtaposition of life and death, Hirst creates a powerful memento mori.
‘The death of an insect … still has this really optimistic beauty of a wonderful thing’ (D. Hirst quoted in The Agony and the Ecstasy: Selected Works from 1989 - 2004, exh. cat., Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples, 2004, p. 83).
Elaborately opulent and breathtakingly monumental, stretching to over three metres in length, Purification is a magnificent example of Damien Hirst’s ambitious, audacious oeuvre. Executed in 2008, this work was created just as Hirst began to arrange his butterflies in ever-more complex permutations, the so-called ‘butterfly grids’, aligning their iridescent bodies into swirling circles, segmented stars and the arched, pointed forms of Gothic windows. In Purification, the gossamer-fine wings of a flight of scarlet insects are laid over an elliptical ground, preserved and imprisoned in a coat of crimson gloss. Their delicate shapes segment the canvas into an exquisite tracery of symmetric rays and concentric circles, culminating in a central vortex, in which a single dismembered butterfly presides. Intersecting the captivating beauty of the Baroque with the poignant death of hundreds of delicate insects, the artist creates an arresting meditation on mortality: ‘Death is one of those things,’ he explained. ‘To live in a society where you're trying not to look at it is stupid, because looking at death throws us back into life with more vigour and energy. The fact that flowers don't last for ever makes them beautiful’ (D. Hirst, quoted in E. Day, ‘Damien Hirst: 'Art is childish and childlike’’, The Observer, 26 September 2010).
Hirst’s works, not least among them the formaldehyde vitrines, medicines cabinets and diamond-encrusted skulls, are characterised by a deadpan directness, which belies even the most overblown of his creations, giving them a touchingly affecting innocence. The same fusion of dark comedy and futile tragedy lies in the conception of the butterfly paintings: ‘I remember painting something white once and flies landing on it, thinking “Fuck!” but then thinking it was funny. This idea of an artist trying to make a monochrome and being fucked up by flies landing in the paint or something like that. Then you get the beauty of the butterfly, but it is actually something horrible I have always liked that idea of something going wrong and something being created from it’ (D. Hirst quoted in The Agony and the Ecstasy: Selected Works from 1989 - 2004, exh. cat., Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples, 2004, p. 136)
Butterflies have been an important medium for Hirst since the earliest stages of his career, first appearing in the landmark 1991 installation In and Out of Love, where the artist transformed the interior of a London space into an exotic habitat, its walls hung with monochromatic works. As the artist recalls, ‘I had white painting with shelves on and the paintings had live pupae for butterflies glued on them. The pupae hatched from the paintings and flew around, so it was like an environment for butterflies …Then downstairs I had another table which had ashtrays on it and canvases with dead butterflies stuck in the paint. There were four boxes with holes in … which were supposed to look like boxes that the butterflies came from there and died in the paint’ (D. Hirst, quoted in Damien Hirst: The Agony and the Ecstasy, exh. cat., Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples, 2004, pp. 74-77).
The butterfly paintings evolved directly from this seminal work, their numbers multiplying and their colours fragmenting as Hirst’s appetite for more unusual and more striking specimens grew. Arranged on the surfaces of his works in decorative schemes which pay no heed to species, type, or origin, they recall the elaborate displays of Victorian conversation pieces. Hirst’s butterfly paintings are driven by the same acquisitive urge as cabinets of curiosities and museum vitrines, whose makers sought to rationalise the beauty of the natural world, to preserve its fascinating wonders forever, and thus to overcome human mortality. This eternal pursuit underlies the duality and symmetry of Purification: in the pairing of fragility and preservation, in the proximity of beauty and horror, in the juxtaposition of life and death, Hirst creates a powerful memento mori.