Presentation | Edition of 75 |
---|---|
Medium | Etching |
Created | 2014 |
Size | 16 x 17.5" |
Signed | Yes |
Genre | Neo |
To Belong, Butterly Landscape by Damien Hirst
“I love butterflies because when they are dead they look alive. The foilblock gives them a feel similar to the actual butterflies in the way that they reflect the light. After ‘The Dead’ I had to do the butterflies because you can’t have one without the other.” – Damien Hirst
Description
To Belong, Butterly Landscape by Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst has intensified his career-long fascination with the beauty, fragility and symbolism of butterflies to create a spectacular and multi-allusive evocation of mortality. More than that of any contemporary artist, and in a modern lineage that includes the work of Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon, the art of Damien Hirst confronts the balances between life and death, vanity and transience, value and worth, faith and existential alienation with a visceral and terrifying immediacy. Hirst’s choices of media, his innovations within them and the sheer scale on which he works, are integral to the philosophical depth and empathetic charge of his art; and to this end, Hirst has always pioneered in his work the uses, aesthetics and allegorical meanings of science and technology, as well as refining a highly sophisticated engagement with craft and technique.
Hirst’s fascination with butterflies derives in large part from the way in which these beautiful insects embody both the beauty and the impermanence of life, becoming symbols of faith and mortality. Of ‘The Souls’ collection he has said: “I love butterflies because when they are dead they look alive. The foilblock makes the butterflies have a feel similar to the actual butterflies in the way that they reflect the light. After ‘The Dead’ I had to do the butterflies because you can’t have one without the other”.
Like Warhol and Bacon, Hirst is in many ways, primarily, a great religious artist. His work – as further evidenced by ‘The Souls’ – deals directly with the timeless and endlessly renewing predicament of faith and belief in the face of mortality. In this, ‘The Souls’ can also be seen to connect directly to the allegories of mortality to be found throughout the history of art. As the butterfly itself is a traditional symbol of the soul, and of the soul’s residence on Earth prior to transmigration to an Afterlife, so ‘The Souls’ surrounds the viewer – chapel-like – with an art which is as meditational and contemplative as it is aesthetically forceful.