Lucy
"Lucy" by Damien Hirst is a striking example of the artist's enduring fascination with the fragile boundary between life and death, rendered through his iconic butterfly motif. The work continues Hirst's exploration of ephemeral beauty first introduced in his landmark 1991 exhibition "In and Out of Love," where the brief existence of butterflies served as a powerful metaphor for mortality and the passage of time. Through the vibrant yet haunting presence of the butterflies embedded within the canvas, Hirst transforms tragic beauty into a meditation on impermanence, inviting the viewer to confront the inevitability of death within the very essence of life.
- Medium
- Damien Hirst’s meteoric career examines the poignant statement embodied in the co-existence of life and death. Through his immediate and spectacular visual language, which ranges from decaying livestock and formaldehyde-dipped animals to vivid dot paintings and harmonic butterfly canvases, the artist addresses the highest expression of the fragility of life and the reluctance to confront death. The transition from life to form is central to Hirst’s poetics, exemplified in his presentation of tragic beauty as agent of death. From his first solo exhibition, of 1991, ‘In and Out of Love’, Hirst introduced the themes of ephemerality and death, which since then have been the polarities which feed his transgressive artistic production. Shortly after his graduation from Goldsmiths in 1989, Hirst began to work on a series of paintings taking inspiration from seeing flies that had become stuck on primed canvases in his Brixton work space. Taking this idea a step further, Hirst started fixing bodies of dead butterflies to monochrome gloss-painted canvases. When Tamara Chozdko organised the exhibition ‘In and Out of Love’ in an ex-travel agent’s office in Woodstock Street, London, the exhibition was comprised of two works exhibited on separate levels. The first, In and Out of Love (White Paintings and Live Butterflies), consisted of a live ecosystem, an artificial humid universe in which eight bare canvases were displayed at street level. Pupae of Malaysian butterflies were literally glued to the white canvases and hatched during the course of the exhibition, leaving butterflies to fly freely around the room until they eventually died. The second work, In and Out of Love (Butterfly Paintings and Ashtrays) constitutes Hirst’s first butterflies painting and was exhibited in the basement of the building. Eight monochrome paintings covered in bright household gloss described by the artist as “solid fucking gloss-paint horror” were embedded with dead butterflies alongside filled ashtrays with cigarette butts on a table. The brief fight of the butterflies upstairs and the cigarette butts in the ashtrays downstairs, all images of passing time, implied Hirst’s early interest in the mechanics of death and the cruel agony present in the inescapable ending of life.
- Spotted At
- Auction House · Phillips
🔨 Auction Lot
Contemporary Evening Sale
July 2, 2014
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