Damien Hirst

White Cube, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate though fails to illustrate the gold leaf covering the edges of each canvas. Condition: This work is in very good condition. no restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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Damien Hirst’s Trinity I is an extraordinarily powerful example of one of the artist’s most iconic and recognisable leitmotifs – the butterfly, inexorably trapped within a base of household gloss. A joyful celebration of the primarily colours - red, yellow and blue - the purity of the monochromes is delicately attenuated by the presence of the butterflies, scattered elegantly over each canvas. Whilst the colours of the butterflies’ wings blend with the overall chromatic tone of each canvas, natural variations in the wings of every different butterfly add a fascinating touch of unpredictability into the overall effect. No longer merely mute representations of the primaries, the presence of the butterflies endows the three canvases with a sense of poignant, yet menacingly exquisite, beauty. Seemingly arbitrary, the butterflies’ placements on the canvas is intended by Hirst to convey the idea of unpredictability, as though the canvases propped up to dry within the artist’s studio had trapped unsuspecting butterflies that happened to venture too close to the wet gloss paint: their otherwise transient beauty immortalised as a result.

Trinity clearly reveals the profound influence that Minimalism has exerted on Hirst throughout his career to date. A movement that glorified in the abstract monochrome as the ultimate in artistic expression, originating in 1960s New York, one of Minimalism’s most celebrated exponents was Ellsworth Kelly, whose monumental Red Yellow Blue II (1965) was undoubtedly a source of particular inspiration for Trinity. In a recent interview, Hirst spoke of his fascination with the movement: "I loved Minimalism because it was everything I wasn’t as a human being. It was a real surprise to me to fall in love with Minimalism." (The artist, cited in an interview with Nicholas Serota in Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate, Damian Hirst, 2012, p. 93). Trinity thus sees Hirst following directly in the great artistic traditions of the giants of the Minimalist movement, yet imparting a distinctly witty, Post-modernist angle into his own interpretation of the movement’s ideals with the inclusion of the colour co-ordinated butterflies.

Whilst Kelly’s title was a model of uncomplicated simplicity, Hirst imbues his own exercise in the primaries with a religious dimension by the evocative choice of Trinity – the idea of the three-in-one - and through the use of the triptych format, reminiscent of religious altarpieces. The tri-partite division echoes the three major lines of artistic enquiry that have dominated Hirst’s career: death, religion and science; all three themes are magnificently encapsulated within Trinity.

Butterflies were one of the earliest sources of inspiration for Hirst: in an interview with Mirta D’Argenzio, he recalled breeding them in his shared bedroom: "I divided half of my bedroom up… I made a huge box in my bedroom. It took up half the bedroom… I found out where you could find the pupae and all that kind of stuff and I got them all… I remember it because it was so cramped." (The artist, cited in an interview with Mirta D’Argenzio in Exhibiton Catalogue, Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Damien Hirst, The Agony and the Ecstasy, Selected Works from 1989-2004, 2004, p. 78). One of his earliest exhibitions, In & Out of Love, held in a one-time travel agent’s office in 1991, featured a combination of ‘traditional’ butterfly paintings (adult specimens on canvas) contrasted with pupae stuck on white canvas; bowls of sugar water placed near the ‘pupae’ canvases allowed the butterflies to feed and mate.  The subsequent hatching and metamorphosis effectively served as a miniature illustration of the complete cycle of life and death: a theme of endless fascination for Hirst. The remarkable ability of a butterfly to still appear beautiful, even in death, proved an intense and lasting source of artistic appeal: "Then you get the beauty of the butterfly… The death of an insect that that still has this really optimistic beauty of a wonderful thing. I remember thinking about that." (The artist, cited in Ibid. p. 83).

Not only is Trinity a masterful exercise in the power of the primaries and an exquisate example of the later butterfly works; it is also a stunning manifestation of Hirst’s boundless imagination and creative brilliance.