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Lot Essay
One of Damien Hirst’s first ever fully-realized butterfly monochromes, Do You Know What I Like About You?, 1994, belongs to a group of twelve for which he won the prestigious Prix Eliette von Karajan in 1995. A vivid apparition on a sublime scale, it stands among the artist’s most vital early creations. A field of sunny yellow gloss paint is studded with the colorful bodies of myriad species of butterfly. As if fixed in flight, their iridescent wings create a magnificent spectacle of life after death: their captivating beauty is preserved in stillness even as they appear to sink into a void of transcendent color. Playing with Minimalist tradition, but demanding an emotive response, each of the original twelve works—titled with references to love and executed in the same 84 x 84 inch format—envelop the viewer in immersive fields of color. A bright, gem-like counterpoint to the darker strains of his artistic fascination with mortality—sharks and livestock in formaldehyde, black masses of dead flies, eerie pharmaceutical displays—Hirst’s butterflies are a celebratory presence. Do You Know What I Like About You? bears witness to the inception of the insects as a crucial medium in Hirst’s practice, and represents perhaps their purest and most lyrical expression.
Where later he would arrange butterflies into grand, radial configurations that echo the form of stained glass windows, Hirst’s first iterations of the butterfly works gave poetic play to light and space. The specimens here are strewn elegantly across their square zone of yellow, poised at flutteringly organic angles. While some are partly or almost entirely consumed by the blank color that encroaches on their outlines, their dispersal suggests a lifelike freedom of movement–an airiness at odds with their entombment in paint, and a far cry from the rigidity of a lepidopterist’s cabinet. Indeed, the initial impulse for the work was born from In and Out of Love, Hirst’s legendary 1991 installation that filled the gallery space with live butterflies. As the artist recalls, “I had white paintings 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, 2004, p. 74). Reflecting Hirst’s darkly comedic sensibility, the butterfly paintings grew from this vision of insects trapped in wet pigment. “I [wanted] it to look like an artist’s studio where he had had colored canvases wet and the butterflies had landed in them,” Hirst goes on to explain. “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… The death of an insect that still has this really optimistic beauty of a wonderful thing” (Ibid.).
This enduring paradox of beauty in death is the keynote of Hirst’s art, and resounds through his landmark early works. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991, perhaps the artist’s most infamous creation, saw a tiger shark preserved in a vitrine of formaldehyde. Confronting the viewer with the natural sublime of the ocean predator, the work also fused art with the immortalizing force of science, its magnificently clinical cabinet sealing the creature from decay. As a dark precursor to the living butterflies of In and Out of Love, his installation A Thousand Years, 1990, employed live flies, a severed cow’s head and an Insect-O-Cutor to conjure an iconic spectacle of birth, death and decay within a similar mausoleum of glass. His early Medicine Cabinets and Spot Paintings presented art as spiritual panacea, ironically contending with the promises of modern medicine. Much as the butterfly paintings act as a potent memento mori, however, in their freedom from such pharmaceutical overtones they seem to offer a more hopeful vision. Where the vitrines and cabinets echo the austere, planar Minimalism of Judd or Stella, the vast canvas of canary yellow in the present work gleams with openness, approaching something more like the sublimity of a Color Field work by Rothko or Newman.
The son of Vladimir Nabokov, author and avid lepidopterist, was at his father’s deathbed in 1977. “A few days before he died there was a moment I remember with special clarity. During the penultimate farewell, after I had kissed his still-warm forehead—as I had for years when saying goodbye—tears suddenly welled in Father’s eyes. I asked him why. He replied that a certain butterfly was already on the wing; and his eyes told me he no longer hoped that he would live to pursue it again” (D. Nabokov, quoted in E. Overbey, “Nabokov’s Butterflies,” New Yorker, January 26, 2011). The butterfly would endure in its freedom, an emblem of life and all its joys persisting after his departure from the world. Taking flight in a reliquary marvel, the miraculous, lasting splendor of the butterflies in Do You Know What I Like About You? similarly elevates death from its banality and bathos. Hirst’s warm title seems to indicate an acceptance, acknowledging death’s darkness but embracing life with a positive sense of commitment. He talks a lot about love in his art, he says, “Because it seems so difficult to sustain. Love is realistic; desire is unrealistic. It’s easier to blindfold yourself, change your girlfriend every 6 months and not look in the mirror than to live with someone forever and see change. Although I’m tired of the word Love, it’s like ‘God.’ Instead of saying ‘I love you,’ I want to say, ‘I’m delighted you’re alive’” (D. Hirst, quoted in Damien Hirst: No Sense of Absolute Corruption, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York, 1996, pp. 116-117). Do You Know What I Like About You? embodies this attitude in a vision of triumph and transcendence. For all that what Hirst calls the work’s “solid fucking gloss-paint horror” (D. Hirst, quoted in D. Hirst and G. Burn, On the Way to Work, London 2001, p. 133) creates an opaque physical barrier, the wall of paint is also something like a window: its brilliant yellow floods the room like sunlight, the butterflies afloat in a space of enchanted sky.
Where later he would arrange butterflies into grand, radial configurations that echo the form of stained glass windows, Hirst’s first iterations of the butterfly works gave poetic play to light and space. The specimens here are strewn elegantly across their square zone of yellow, poised at flutteringly organic angles. While some are partly or almost entirely consumed by the blank color that encroaches on their outlines, their dispersal suggests a lifelike freedom of movement–an airiness at odds with their entombment in paint, and a far cry from the rigidity of a lepidopterist’s cabinet. Indeed, the initial impulse for the work was born from In and Out of Love, Hirst’s legendary 1991 installation that filled the gallery space with live butterflies. As the artist recalls, “I had white paintings 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, 2004, p. 74). Reflecting Hirst’s darkly comedic sensibility, the butterfly paintings grew from this vision of insects trapped in wet pigment. “I [wanted] it to look like an artist’s studio where he had had colored canvases wet and the butterflies had landed in them,” Hirst goes on to explain. “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… The death of an insect that still has this really optimistic beauty of a wonderful thing” (Ibid.).
This enduring paradox of beauty in death is the keynote of Hirst’s art, and resounds through his landmark early works. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991, perhaps the artist’s most infamous creation, saw a tiger shark preserved in a vitrine of formaldehyde. Confronting the viewer with the natural sublime of the ocean predator, the work also fused art with the immortalizing force of science, its magnificently clinical cabinet sealing the creature from decay. As a dark precursor to the living butterflies of In and Out of Love, his installation A Thousand Years, 1990, employed live flies, a severed cow’s head and an Insect-O-Cutor to conjure an iconic spectacle of birth, death and decay within a similar mausoleum of glass. His early Medicine Cabinets and Spot Paintings presented art as spiritual panacea, ironically contending with the promises of modern medicine. Much as the butterfly paintings act as a potent memento mori, however, in their freedom from such pharmaceutical overtones they seem to offer a more hopeful vision. Where the vitrines and cabinets echo the austere, planar Minimalism of Judd or Stella, the vast canvas of canary yellow in the present work gleams with openness, approaching something more like the sublimity of a Color Field work by Rothko or Newman.
The son of Vladimir Nabokov, author and avid lepidopterist, was at his father’s deathbed in 1977. “A few days before he died there was a moment I remember with special clarity. During the penultimate farewell, after I had kissed his still-warm forehead—as I had for years when saying goodbye—tears suddenly welled in Father’s eyes. I asked him why. He replied that a certain butterfly was already on the wing; and his eyes told me he no longer hoped that he would live to pursue it again” (D. Nabokov, quoted in E. Overbey, “Nabokov’s Butterflies,” New Yorker, January 26, 2011). The butterfly would endure in its freedom, an emblem of life and all its joys persisting after his departure from the world. Taking flight in a reliquary marvel, the miraculous, lasting splendor of the butterflies in Do You Know What I Like About You? similarly elevates death from its banality and bathos. Hirst’s warm title seems to indicate an acceptance, acknowledging death’s darkness but embracing life with a positive sense of commitment. He talks a lot about love in his art, he says, “Because it seems so difficult to sustain. Love is realistic; desire is unrealistic. It’s easier to blindfold yourself, change your girlfriend every 6 months and not look in the mirror than to live with someone forever and see change. Although I’m tired of the word Love, it’s like ‘God.’ Instead of saying ‘I love you,’ I want to say, ‘I’m delighted you’re alive’” (D. Hirst, quoted in Damien Hirst: No Sense of Absolute Corruption, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York, 1996, pp. 116-117). Do You Know What I Like About You? embodies this attitude in a vision of triumph and transcendence. For all that what Hirst calls the work’s “solid fucking gloss-paint horror” (D. Hirst, quoted in D. Hirst and G. Burn, On the Way to Work, London 2001, p. 133) creates an opaque physical barrier, the wall of paint is also something like a window: its brilliant yellow floods the room like sunlight, the butterflies afloat in a space of enchanted sky.