DAMIEN HIRST | Samsara

White Cube, London
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2010

Yokohama, Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama Triennale 2011, Our Magic Hour - How Much of the World Can We Know?, August - November 2011, pp. 8 and 120, illustrated in colour 

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original and it fails to fully convey the iridescent nature of the butterflies and the metallic qualities of the gold inner frame. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals a few tiny creases, spots of wear and tiny tears to the butterflies, which is in keeping with the artist's working process. Extremely close inspection reveals a tiny surface irregularity to the gold leaf in the upper left of the inner frame.
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"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 1997, p. 132). Samsara is an iridescent, shimmering instance of Damien Hirst’s Kaleidoscope Paintings: mercurial layers of butterfly wings are integrated into a thick household gloss before application to canvas. While the symmetry and brightness of Samsara evokes a circular Renaissance tondo of fine stained glass, the delicacy and intricacy of its patterns appear beyond the scope of human creation: a product of millennia of random adaptations; a perfection by trial. Eighteen identical sectors of sumptuous, floral forms coalesce in a dense auburn bullseye at the centre. The planar borders of these sectors create a mesmerising illusionistic space in which the central focal point appears by turns to approach or recede from the viewer. The effect is not just attractive, but perplexing: we are the potential mate, as well as the stunned predator.

The internal symmetry of the present work is augmented by its shape’s isomorphism with the meaning of its title: ‘samsara’ denotes both directional wandering, and cyclic change along this linear path. The concept was first defined clearly by the Sramanic texts of Buddhism and Jainism, wherein this prosaic, circuitous state was opposed to the liberation of ‘Moksha’: the only form of Earthly salvation. With a nexus of dazzling patterns, Samsara seems mimetic of both these concepts: it causes in the viewer a stupefaction resembling the daze of habit, and intimates, by radial expansion, the realm beyond. The life-cycle of the butterflies, too, works cyclically, “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: Exh. Cat., London, Tate, Damien Hirst, 2012, p. 203). Other works of this series are named after Old Testament Psalms, and Hirst, a staunch materialist, seems here to be situating the religious within the morbidly beautiful forms generated by natural selection. Just as John Milton expressed the Psalms in poetic meter to render them more easily sung by choirs, Hirst transmutes them into the ornaments of the Kaleidoscope Paintings. 

Hirst’s relationship with butterflies is profound and symbiotic. In 1991, Hirst implemented his career-launching In and Out of Love piece in London. Black caterpillar pupae were embedded by Hirst in the white paint of several canvases, with rows of potted flowers along their bases. The hatching of the butterflies, and their flying toward the flowers, was timed precisely to coincide with the viewers’ experience of the work.  In and Out of Love put Hirst on the map in an artistic gesture resembling its content: the piece itself – like the wings of the butterflies within it – is a visual display driven by the desire for success. Simultaneously, however, the piece is a stark momento mori. Through In and Out of Love and the Kaleidoscope Paintings, Hirst creates an uncanny festival of life whose jubilation depends on its use of death, or visibly fleeting life, as raw material.

It is important that the present work is viscerally felt, and not reduced simply to an object of rational inquiry. Hirst explicitly does not identify as a conceptual artist – there is no determinate set of propositions signaled as admissibly inferable from his work – and his intention is rather to collapse the distinction between art and life. Where Hirst diverges from artists like Marcel Duchamp, however, is that he does not set out to make works that question the nature of art by aesthetically framing objects we thought forever inartistic. Instead, as Andrew Wilson puts it, Hirst “creates art through direct engagement with the stuff of life so that it might become life itself” (Ibid., p. 205). In this way, exhibitions of Samsara and the Kaleidoscope Paintings constitute small pieces of theatre. The dénouement is always the same: the rapturous addition of an object to the world.