DAMIEN HIRST | SKULL, ASHTRAY, LEMON

White Cube, London

Acquired from the above by the present owner in December 2008

“The world gets darker as you get older. I'm 44 now and I did a massive amount of celebrating for 20 years. For a while there, I actually believed I was going to live forever, but having friends dying means you just have to accept you're not immortal. I can quietly express those things in paintings, but there was no way I could express that in a spin or a spot and it was starting to gnaw away at me. Maybe I'm having a midlife crisis, because all art should be a celebration of life in some way, a map of a man or a woman's life. Art is a great way to look at the darkness without having to look at it directly, because the real darkness is fucking unbearable.” 

(Damien Hirst, quoted in Ossian Ward, “Interview with Damien Hirst,” Time Out, October 2009, online)