Damien Hirst — H17 - Civilisation For Sale

Damien Hirst H17 - Civilisation Prints For Sale

Market Authority & Performance

Guy Hepner, New York, has facilitated $4,226,125 in Damien Hirst transactions, establishing definitive expertise in navigating the artist's complex and historically significant market.

Within this strengthening environment, Hirst's editions and multiples occupy a strategic collecting category, offering access to museum-quality conceptual work at entry points substantially below his unique sculptures and installations. The Civilisation series, released in 2024, represents Hirst's continued investigation of humanity's relationship with mortality, progress, and collapse—themes that have defined his four-decade career.

Series Context & Conceptual Framework

The Civilisation series extends Hirst's longstanding meditation on the fragility of human achievement. Where his iconic spot paintings explored pharmaceutical hope and his formaldehyde works confronted biological mortality, Civilisation examines the arc of collective human endeavor—its ascent, explanation, destruction, and decline. This quartet of works forms a philosophical narrative about the impermanence of systems, empires, and ideologies.

Hirst has consistently engaged with grand themes through systematic visual language, from the memento mori tradition of his skull works to the cabinet aesthetics of his pharmaceutical pieces. The Civilisation series continues this trajectory while marking a notable shift toward direct titular narrative. Each work's title—Rising, Falling, Exploding, Explained—suggests a trajectory of civilization itself, positioning the viewer within an ongoing historical cycle rather than before a static object.

The 2024 release date situates these works within a specific cultural moment characterized by technological disruption, geopolitical instability, and renewed discourse around civilizational resilience. Hirst's timing demonstrates his characteristic ability to produce work that resonates with contemporary anxieties while maintaining the timeless quality that sustains long-term market interest.

Technical Specifications

The Civilisation series employs giclée printing on Cotton Smooth Rag, a substrate chosen for archival permanence and tonal fidelity. This paper stock delivers exceptional color saturation while maintaining the subtle textural presence that distinguishes fine art prints from commercial reproduction. The cotton rag composition ensures acid-free longevity, with properly stored examples maintaining color integrity for generations.

Giclée technology allows Hirst to achieve precise translation of his conceptual vision, with each print produced under controlled conditions that meet museum conservation standards. This technical approach aligns with Hirst's broader practice of employing industrial and scientific processes—whether formaldehyde preservation, spin painting mechanics, or pharmaceutical-grade materials—to realize works that operate at the intersection of art and systematic production.

All works in the Civilisation series are authenticated through Science Ltd, Hirst's studio organization, which maintains comprehensive documentation and provenance records. Gallery representation through White Cube further establishes the institutional framework supporting these editions within the primary market ecosystem.

Notable Works in the Series

Civilisation Rising (2024) opens the conceptual sequence, addressing the aspirational phase of human collective achievement. This work establishes the visual and thematic vocabulary that the subsequent pieces will complicate and ultimately subvert.

Civilisation Explained (2024) occupies a contemplative position within the series, suggesting the moment when societies attempt to understand and codify their own systems—philosophy, science, religion, and governance as mechanisms for self-comprehension.

Civilisation Exploding (2024) represents the violent rupture that Hirst has explored throughout his career, from the bisected animals of his Natural History series to the destructive implications of his pharmacy works. Here, the explosion functions both literally and metaphorically, encompassing warfare, revolution, and paradigm collapse.

Civilisation Falling (2024) concludes the narrative arc with decline and dissolution, completing a cycle that suggests both finality and the possibility of renewal—a thematic structure resonant with historical philosophy from Gibbon to Spengler.

Hirst's Practice in Context

Damien Hirst emerged as a defining figure of the Young British Artists movement in the late 1980s, building a body of work across painting, sculpture, and printmaking united by a sustained conceptual interest in mortality, science, medicine, and belief systems. His prints and editions extend the visual language developed across his sculptural and painted work — repetition, colour systems, and the tension between clinical precision and organic subject matter — into widely accessible reproducible form.

Hirst's work is held in the permanent collections of major museums worldwide, and his 2008 "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever" single-artist auction at Sotheby's, which bypassed the traditional gallery system entirely, remains one of the most widely discussed events in the recent history of the contemporary art market.