Beschreibung:

Damien Hirst Eternity 2002-2004 Butterflies and gloss household paint on canvas. 84 x 210 in. (213.4 x 533.4 cm).
Provenance White Cube, London Catalogue Essay For centuries, the image of the butterfly has been revered and reproduced by numerous cultural and religious groups, not only for its inherent beauty, but also for its symbolic significance. The butterfly can represent development, change and evolution at its most basic physiological level. The insect’s metamorphosis into a fully realized butterfly is one that is familiar to many; the egg hatches into a caterpillar which grows and then develops into a formed butterfly. It is in this unusual and fragile natural transformation that the process of life begins. To others, the butterfly’s associations are more symbolic and steeped with religious and spiritual meaning. The ancient Greek goddess of beauty Psyche was frequently depicted as a butterfly, or part butterfly in ancient iconography. To the Native Americans, it is believed that if you whisper a secret to a butterfly, the secret will be safe forever, release it and it will carry your wish to the Great Spirit. It is only by releasing the butterfly from captivity that it will help to restore the balance of nature and your wish will be granted. Damien Hirst has gained his international status as a contemporary artstar by using animals such as cows, pigs, sheep, sharks, flies and of course butterflies as the central focus of some of his most ambitious and successful works to date. By using these animals in his work, Hirst comments not only on the mortality of these particular creatures, but on the idea of mortality in general. It is in fact this larger notion of balance in nature and eternal cycles – life and death – that Hirst is most concerned with in his works of art. From his earliest taxidermies through to his latest exhibition appropriately titled, Beyond Belief, at London’s White Cube Gallery, Hirst has probed the grand theoretical constructs of mortality and eternal life. For this particular exhibition, Hirst exhibited, For the Love of God, 2007 (cf. Figure 1) a life-sized platinum cast skull consisting of 8,601 diamonds, further defining his interest in the associations of life and death, and continuing a dialogue with his previous body of work. Damien Hirst graduated from Goldsmiths College in 1989 where he curated the seminal exhibition Freeze the year before, highlighting works from many of his peers who with him would later go on to form the Young British Artists movement. This momentous exhibition helped to gain notoriety for the artist and create a buzz around his work up until the first butterfly paintings were exhibited in June and July of 1991. The Woodstock Gallery in London was the site of this exhibition titled In and Out of Love. For the show, Hirst would fill the gallery with hundreds of live butterflies, many of which spawned from those adhered to his monochromatic canvases with gloss household paint. The gallery was transformed into an artificial environment in which the butterflies would hatch, become whole and die. By exhibiting live and dead insects together, Hirst would create an incubator, a place where the cycle of life and death co-existed for all to experience. This notion of observing mortality would continue to be an important theme in much of Hirst’s work moving forward. “I tried to make a comparison between art and life in the upstairs and downstairs installations, a crazy thing to do when in the end it’s all art.”(Damien Hirst in R.Violet, ed., IWant to Spend the Resto of My Life Elsewhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now., London, 1997, n.p.) The present work, Eternity, 2002-2004, is a unique and beautiful example of a Damien Hirst butterfly painting. Created more than a decade after the first of the butterfly paintings was exhibited, Eternity benefits from the series’ maturing over a decade and incorporates a vivid and vibrant display of colors. Although each butterfly is different in shape, there is an overarching sense of balance and symmetry within the work, a tribute to the a