Mental Escapology

Throughout his career Damien Hirst has explored the idea of modern medicine as a new religion, a secular alternative to the heaven and hell of his Catholic upbringing. Hirst adroitly translates his obsession with medicine and pharmacology into his chess set design. Simulating a medical consultation room or theatre, with dentist chair, surgical trolley and cabinets replete with pill bottles, the game of chess becomes a metaphor for the life and death scenarios enacted in waiting rooms and hospital surgeries. Hirst creates a fetish of the modern clinical interior, recasting these often unaesthetic spaces, adorned with cheap utilitarian furniture, into the luxurious idiom of the high street; of glass and mirrors, chrome and white leather upholstery. In the shape of plastic pill bottles, his chess pieces have undergone a process of alchemical transformation, from the dross of mass-produced packaging into solid silver and lead crystal sculptures with sandblasted labelling. Transposed into the system of chess, Hirst’s bottles reflect a corresponding hierarchy of drugs, from recreational stimulants to those promising to alleviate the symptoms of mortality.

This work is accompanied by a certificate issued by the publisher.