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Lot Essay
Suspended across an immense and glossy sky-blue canvas of almost two by two metres, Damien Hirst’s Wonderful Week (2008) presents a mesmeric kaleidoscope of butterflies. In what is undoubtedly one of his most iconic and widely celebrated series, the iridescent butterflies in Hirst’s Butterfly Paintings are transfixed upon the canvas like inlaid gemstones, their diaphanous wings delicately spread open in a captivating display. Retaining an impossible, immaculate beauty even in death, the insect is a perfect embodiment of the inquiry at the heart of Hirst’s artistic practice, that of life, death, and perishability.
Fixed to the canvas in a fluttering array of yellows, whites and blues, the insects appear as though captured in flight amidst a cloudless sky. Conjuring the luminous, pale Venetian blues of Titian’s canvases, Hirst’s Wonderful Week is at first glance entrancingly lyrical. Belying the glossy surface of household paint however, are the potent and disquieting connotations of mortality. As though mimicking the twisted fantasy of the Victorian lepidopterist, piercing the specimens with pins upon a mount, Hirst captures the beauty of the living in an artificially preserved death. This timeless paradox has driven Hirst’s most acclaimed and radical works, notably his animal carcass and formaldehyde vitrines The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, and Mother and Child Divided, which won him the Turner Prize in 1995. Like Hirst’s shark or calf, the butterflies in Wonderful Week are engulfed within an immense, spectacular pool of chemical blue; the canvas looms with the grandeur of an antiseptic tomb.
The use of exotic butterflies in his paintings and installations launched Hirst as a household name. In his seminal first solo exhibition In and Out of Love, 1991, Hirst installed a room of butterflies in a humidified Soho gallery space. Upstairs, live pupae were glued to white canvasses, from which butterflies hatched and flew. Feeding on sugared water, mating, laying eggs, and eventually dying, the warm room became a macabre sanctuary of an entire life cycle. Downstairs, Hirst hung eight of his first monochromatic, pastel Butterfly Paintings. Executed almost two decades later, Wonderful Week stands as a testament to the unabating significance of the butterfly motif. Like a contemporary play on the memento mori, a device popularised in oil paintings of the seventeenth century, Hirst confronts his present-day viewer with his elected symbol of mortality. Imbued with its own connotations of Christ’s resurrection, the butterfly, emerging reborn from its chrysalis, is an emblem of metamorphosis, and speaks to life beyond the bounds of the perishable body. Wonderful Week is an impressive example of what Hirst does best. Exploring highly conceptual notions of existence via the physical, tangible matter of the once-living, he sheds light on the strangely beautiful fragility of life.
Fixed to the canvas in a fluttering array of yellows, whites and blues, the insects appear as though captured in flight amidst a cloudless sky. Conjuring the luminous, pale Venetian blues of Titian’s canvases, Hirst’s Wonderful Week is at first glance entrancingly lyrical. Belying the glossy surface of household paint however, are the potent and disquieting connotations of mortality. As though mimicking the twisted fantasy of the Victorian lepidopterist, piercing the specimens with pins upon a mount, Hirst captures the beauty of the living in an artificially preserved death. This timeless paradox has driven Hirst’s most acclaimed and radical works, notably his animal carcass and formaldehyde vitrines The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, and Mother and Child Divided, which won him the Turner Prize in 1995. Like Hirst’s shark or calf, the butterflies in Wonderful Week are engulfed within an immense, spectacular pool of chemical blue; the canvas looms with the grandeur of an antiseptic tomb.
The use of exotic butterflies in his paintings and installations launched Hirst as a household name. In his seminal first solo exhibition In and Out of Love, 1991, Hirst installed a room of butterflies in a humidified Soho gallery space. Upstairs, live pupae were glued to white canvasses, from which butterflies hatched and flew. Feeding on sugared water, mating, laying eggs, and eventually dying, the warm room became a macabre sanctuary of an entire life cycle. Downstairs, Hirst hung eight of his first monochromatic, pastel Butterfly Paintings. Executed almost two decades later, Wonderful Week stands as a testament to the unabating significance of the butterfly motif. Like a contemporary play on the memento mori, a device popularised in oil paintings of the seventeenth century, Hirst confronts his present-day viewer with his elected symbol of mortality. Imbued with its own connotations of Christ’s resurrection, the butterfly, emerging reborn from its chrysalis, is an emblem of metamorphosis, and speaks to life beyond the bounds of the perishable body. Wonderful Week is an impressive example of what Hirst does best. Exploring highly conceptual notions of existence via the physical, tangible matter of the once-living, he sheds light on the strangely beautiful fragility of life.