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Lot Essay
Created in 2005, Damien Hirst’s Quo Vadis aestheticises the wonders of science. The work comes from the collection of Jasper Morrison, the acclaimed designer who collaborated with Hirst on the furniture for the Notting Hill restaurant Pharmacy. As its name suggests, Hirst’s establishment resembled a pharmacy; it opened in 1998, coinciding with artist’s homonymous installation at Tate Britain. Displayed across Quo Vadis’s four shelves is a tidy arrangement of amber-tinted medicinal bottles, packets, and miraculous tinctures. Their presence collectively speaks to the fragility of the body, but like the white walls of a gallery, the sleek glass shelves of the present work render these ordinary objects strange and beguiling. Indeed, under Hirst’s deft hand, the medicines move further away from their original function, and in doing so, they become aesthetic objects with wider cultural connotations. As Hirst reflected, ‘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, I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, London 2005, p. 229).
For Hirst, the pharmacy has long been a site of magical possibility and blind faith. Visiting a drugstore with his mother, Hirst noticed the ‘complete trust’ she had in medicine’s ability to improve her life; it was a conviction whose origins he could not identify (D. Hirst quoted in G. Burn and D. Hirst, On the Way to Work, London 2001, p. 25). Such curative potential is contained within the cabinet of Quo Vadis, whose shrine-like composition evokes salvation and healing. By reflecting society’s utter confidence in medical science, Quo Vadis visualises the connection between modern medicine and religion, a confidence alluded to in the title of the present work—and transferred it to the artwork itself. ‘I really loved the idea,’ he has said, ‘of art maybe, you know, curing people’ (D. Hirst quoted in ibid., p. 25).
For Hirst, the pharmacy has long been a site of magical possibility and blind faith. Visiting a drugstore with his mother, Hirst noticed the ‘complete trust’ she had in medicine’s ability to improve her life; it was a conviction whose origins he could not identify (D. Hirst quoted in G. Burn and D. Hirst, On the Way to Work, London 2001, p. 25). Such curative potential is contained within the cabinet of Quo Vadis, whose shrine-like composition evokes salvation and healing. By reflecting society’s utter confidence in medical science, Quo Vadis visualises the connection between modern medicine and religion, a confidence alluded to in the title of the present work—and transferred it to the artwork itself. ‘I really loved the idea,’ he has said, ‘of art maybe, you know, curing people’ (D. Hirst quoted in ibid., p. 25).