Damien Hirst

Gagosian Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Damien Hirst: The Agony and the Ecstasy. Selected Works from 1989 - 2004, 2004-5, p. 92, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality of the blue is lighter in the original, and the illustration fails to convey the bright tones and iridescent quality of the butterflies. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals a very small loss to the extreme edge at ten o'clock. Very close inspection reveals three tiny spots of media accretion towards the centre of the top edge, towards the centre at the bottom edge, and towards the centre of the top left quadrant, respectively. There is a small loss to one of the wings on the butterfly towards the outer edge at five o'clock.
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The inspired application of exotic butterflies to the painted surface is one of Damien Hirst’s earliest and most defining artistic innovations, initiated shortly after he graduated from Goldsmiths in 1989. Executed in 1997, Girl comprises a magnificent and stunning sublimation of Hirst’s butterfly painting corpus, and was prestigiously included in the exhibition Damien Hirst: The Agony and the Ecstasy, Selected Works from 1989-2004 held at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples in 2004-5. Across the absorptive surface of the present work, a mesmerising dissemination of gem-like butterflies against a field of sumptuous lapis-lazuli blue confers an irresistible resplendence that belies the gruesome nature of the works' construction - whose wings have been plucked and dismembered from their bodies and trapped within sticky gloss paint. Instead, with its sumptuously glossy background, cheerful title, and gossamer-winged ornaments, Girl harnesses the ineffably appealing quality that first inspired Hirst to employ butterflies as a medium. He has said: “I think rather than be personal you have to find universal triggers: everyone’s frightened of glass, everyone’s frightened of sharks, everyone loves butterflies” (Damien Hirst, I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, London 2005, p. 132).

For centuries prior to Hirst’s creations, artists strove to replicate the mesmerising patterning of flora and fauna, whose intricacies were thought to reveal God’s masterful craftsmanship of nature. In a radical gesture, Hirst obfuscated the mimetic divide between life and art, interweaving each in their primal forms to produce a minimalist monochrome surface studded with marvelously opalescent butterflies. These contradictory and yet complimentary themes – of religion, nature, mortality, and beauty – entwine in the butterfly paintings. Tate Britain curator Andrew Wilson has written: “The butterfly’s life-cycle is one of regeneration and transformation, and in Hirst’s hands this symbol of love becomes a powerful means by which the certainty of death can be apprehended from the point of view of a celebration of life and thought” (Andrew Wilson, ‘Believer’ in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Modern, Damien Hirst, 2012, p. 203). For Hirst and his morbid fascination with death and decay, these delicate and effervescent insects bestow an unrivalled expression of the beauty and fragility of life. Representing a resplendent and iconic exemplification of Hirst’s most career-defining concerns, Girl, though ostensibly morbid, nonetheless broadcasts a suspended animation of beauty, a disconcerting yet jubilant celebration of life.