Damien Hirst,  is one of the most influential and controversial figures in contemporary art. Emerging in the late 1980s as a central figure of the Young British Artists (YBAs), Hirst became internationally known for works that confront viewers with themes of life, death, science, and belief. From vitrines containing preserved animals to dazzling paintings composed of thousands of colored dots, Hirst’s work explores the fragile boundary between life and mortality. His artistic practice combines conceptual rigor with striking visual impact, often provoking debate about the nature of art, spectacle, and value. Over the past three decades, Hirst has built one of the most recognizable artistic brands of the contemporary era, producing an extensive body of work that spans sculpture, painting, installations, and editions.

 

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Introduction

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Damien Hirst, born in Bristol in 1965 and raised in Leeds, studied at Goldsmiths College, where he quickly became a central figure among a group of young artists who would redefine the British art scene in the late 1980s.

In 1988, while still a student, Hirst curated the now legendary exhibition Freeze, which introduced many of the artists who would later be grouped under the label Young British Artists. The exhibition attracted the attention of influential collector Charles Saatchi, whose support played a decisive role in launching the careers of several YBA artists, including Hirst.

The Natural History Series

One of Hirst’s most iconic bodies of work is the Natural History series, begun in the early 1990s. These works consist of animals preserved in formaldehyde and displayed inside large glass vitrines. The most famous example is The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), a tiger shark suspended in a tank of formaldehyde.

The work is held in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, after having been widely exhibited internationally. The piece immediately established Hirst as one of the most provocative artists of his generation. The Natural History works confront the viewer directly with mortality, transforming scientific display into a meditation on death and the limits of human understanding.

Spot Paintings

Another central series in Hirst’s oeuvre is the Spot Paintings, begun in 1986. These works consist of grids of evenly spaced colored dots painted on white backgrounds. Each color appears only once within a painting, creating compositions that appear both systematic and strangely vibrant.

The Spot Paintings explore themes of order, repetition, and industrial production. Although some early examples were painted by Hirst himself, the majority were executed by studio assistants, raising questions about authorship and artistic labor. Many Spot Paintings are held in major institutional collections including the Tate Modern.

Spin Paintings

Hirst’s Spin Paintings introduce a radically different visual language. Created by pouring paint onto a rapidly spinning canvas, the works produce dynamic radial patterns of color. The technique removes traditional brushwork and introduces an element of mechanical chance into the painting process.

The Spin Paintings reflect Hirst’s interest in randomness, energy, and visual spectacle. They also blur the line between fine art and entertainment, echoing the aesthetic of amusement parks or scientific demonstrations.

Butterfly Paintings

Butterflies appear frequently throughout Hirst’s work and have become one of his most recognizable motifs. In the Butterfly Paintings, real butterfly wings are arranged in intricate symmetrical patterns across large canvases. The resulting compositions resemble stained-glass windows, combining extraordinary visual beauty with the unsettling knowledge that the materials are derived from living creatures.

The butterfly functions as a powerful symbol of transformation, fragility, and mortality—recurring themes throughout Hirst’s work.

The Diamond Skull and Recent Series

One of Hirst’s most famous works is For the Love of God (2007), a platinum cast of a human skull covered with over 8,000 diamonds. The sculpture was unveiled in London in 2007 and quickly became one of the most widely discussed artworks of the early twenty-first century. Combining themes of luxury, death, and spectacle, the piece embodies Hirst’s fascination with the intersection of art, commerce, and belief.

In recent years, Hirst has continued to experiment with painting and new technologies. His most notable recent series include: Cherry Blossoms (large-scale paintings exploring color, texture, and abstraction), Veil Paintings (dense compositions composed of overlapping dots), or The Currency (2021) (a project combining physical paintings with NFTs, exploring the relationship between digital ownership and traditional art objects) These projects demonstrate Hirst’s continued interest in challenging the boundaries between art, commerce, and technology.

Institutional Presence

Examples of Damien Hirst’s works can be found in major institutions including the Tate, London; the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; The Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Centre George Pompidou in Paris.

A major retrospective of his work titled Damien Hirst was presented in Venice in 2017 across Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana. The exhibition presented the monumental project Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable and attracted international attention.

 

Recent Museum Exhibitions

MUSEUM OF URBAN AND CONTEMPORARY ART (MUCA), Germany

Damien Hirst – The Weight of Things » MUCA

National Art Center, Tokyo

Damien Hirst, Cherry Blossoms | Special Exhibitions | THE NATIONAL ART CENTER, TOKYO (nact.jp)

Gallery Representation

Damien Hirst is represented by several leading contemporary galleries. His primary commercial representation includes: Gagosian and White Cube.

 

These galleries have organized numerous exhibitions of Hirst’s work in major international art centers including London, New York, Hong Kong, and Paris.

Few artists of the past thirty years have generated as much attention and debate as Damien Hirst. His work confronts viewers with fundamental questions about mortality, belief, and the nature of art itself. By combining conceptual ideas with striking visual imagery, Hirst helped redefine the possibilities of contemporary art in the late twentieth century. Whether admired or criticized, his work continues to occupy a central place in the global art world and remains a defining example of the cultural energy of the Young British Artists movement.

Hirst’s interest in the intersections of art and science are well documented and long-standing. As Jonathan Jones suggested on the occasion of Hirst’s White Cube presentation of Mandala paintings, this inquiry was there at the artist’s conceptual beginnings, having always ‘claimed the same privilege for art that science has taken for granted since the 17th century – to pin the natural world to a table, to dissect and examine it. Lending itself naturally to the serial approach practiced by the artist and drawing conceptual connections with both Hirst’s Natural History series and his cabinet works, Victorian lepidoptery especially emphasized visual display over a strictly taxonomic organization, a tradition well-suited to Hirst’s own aesthetic approach. Doing away with the human imposition of order, Hirst’s Kaleidoscope works instead offer a geometric and compound vision, one that, perhaps, invokes the eye of the butterfly itself.

PART I: SUMMARY

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Auction Market Overview

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2025 AUCTION STATISTICS
Turnover: USD 13,994,293
-3.6% (vs. 2024)
# Lots sold: 46
Sell-Through Rate: 77%

MARKET SEGMENTATION
48% of sales in the UK

Highest Price Achieved at Auction:
GBP 9,652,074 / USD 19,232,910
(21 June 2007)

Damien Hirst occupies a unique position in the contemporary art market. His work has achieved extraordinary commercial success, particularly during the 2000s when demand for Young British Artists reached its peak.

In 2008, Hirst made art market history with the auction Beautiful Inside My Head Forever at Sotheby’s. Instead of selling through galleries, Hirst consigned an entire exhibition of new works directly to auction. The sale generated approximately $200 million, making it one of the most successful single-artist auctions ever held.

Damien Hirst’s auction record was set in 2007, when the sculpture Lullaby Spring (2002) sold for $19.2 million at Sotheby’s. The work belongs to Hirst’s Medicine Cabinet series, which presents pharmaceutical packaging arranged inside stainless steel cabinets. The series reflects Hirst’s interest in modern medicine, belief systems, and the human desire for cures.

The market for Damien Hirst is unusually complex due to the vast number of works produced by the artist and his studio. Unique sculptures and major installations occupy the top tier of the market and typically appear in evening sales. Paintings and editioned works are more widely traded and form the backbone of Hirst’s secondary market. Despite fluctuations in prices following the financial crisis of 2008, Hirst remains one of the most recognizable names in contemporary art, with a large international collector base.

Auction Summary

2025 Auction Highlights

46 lots sold at auction in 2025 for a total turnover of USD 13,994,293. With 14 lots failing to sell, the sell-through rate is 77%. Momentary Love Blossom, a painting dated 2018, from The Collection of Laurence and Patrick Seguin in Paris, sold at Sotheby’s in New-York on 18 November 2025 for USD 3,040,000, the highest price paid at auction for a work by Damien Hirst in 2025.

2025 Top 3 Lots

2 lots sold for more than USD 1 million, generating a cumulative turnover of USD 5,268,000, representing 37.6% of the total turnover for 2025. 8 lots sold for more than USD 500,000, generating a cumulative turnover of USD 8,935,632, representing 63.8% of the total turnover for 2025.

2024 Auction Highlights

45 lots sold at auction in 2024 for a total turnover of USD 14,517,539. With 11 lots failing to sell, the sell-through rate is 80%. The highest price has been achieved at Christie’s in London on 9 October 2024, when Assumption, a painting dated 2012 sold for GBP 945,000 (USD 1,237,950), one of only 2 lots that sold for more than USD 1 million.

2024 Top 3 Lots

10 lots sold for more than USD 500,000, generating a cumulative turnover of USD 8,010,075, representing 54.2% of the total turnover for 2024.

2023 Auction Highlights

50 lots sold at auction in 2023 for a total turnover of USD 22,264,139. With 9 lots failing to sell, the sell-through rate is 85%. The highest price of 2023 was achieved for a Medicine Cabinet at Christie’s in New-York on 9 March 2023 that sold for USD 2,220,000.

2023 Top 3 Lots

Only three lots sold for over USD 1 million in 2023. The Top 15 lots generated a cumulative turnover of USD 14,135,380, contributing 63.5% to the total turnover for 2023.

2022 Auction Highlights

44 lots sold at auction in 2022 for a total turnover of USD 33,731,876. With 9 lots failing to sell, the sell-through rate is 83%. The most expensive lot of 2022 is Happy Life Blossom, a gigantic canvas from the Cherry Blossom series sold at Sotheby’s in New-York on 19 May 2022 for USD 5,609,900.

2022 Top 3 Lots

8 lots sold for over USD 1 million. The Top 15 lots generated a cumulative turnover of USD 23,205,756, contributing 68.8% to the total turnover for 2022.

2021 Auction Highlights

40 lots sold at auction in 2021 for a total turnover of USD 19,302,744. With only 2 lots failing to sell, the sell-through rate is 95%. The highest price of USD 3,450,000 for 2021 was achieved by The Warrior and the Bear sold at Christie’s in New-York on 11 May 2021.

2021 Top 3 Lots

5 lots sold for over USD 1 million. The Top 15 lots generated a cumulative turnover of USD 14,402,117, contributing 74.6% to the total turnover for 2021.

 

 

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Top Lots

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#1. Lullaby Spring, 2002

Sotheby’s London: 21 June 2007
Estimated: GBP 4,000,000 – 4,000,000
GBP 9,652,074 / USD 19,232,910

(#36) Damien Hirst (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST
Lullaby Spring, 2002
Stainless steel and glass cabinet with painted cast pills
72x108x4 inches (182.9 x 274.3 x 10.2 cm)

#2. The Golden Calf, 2008

Sotheby’s London: 15 September 2008
Estimated: GBP 8,000,000 – 12,000,000
GBP 10,345,250 / USD 18,490,533

(#13) Damien Hirst (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST
The Golden Calf, 2008
Calf, 18 carat gold, glass, gold-plated steel, silicone and formaldehyde solution with Carrara marble plinth
215.4 x 320 x 137.2cm (84 3/4 x 126 x 54 inches)

#3. The Kingdom, 2008

Sotheby’s London: 15 September 2008
Estimated: GBP 4,000,000 – 6,000,000
GBP 9,561,250 / USD 17,089,254

(#5) Damien Hirst (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST
The Kingdom, 2008
Tiger shark, glass, steel, silicone and formaldehyde solution with steel plinth
51 3/8 x 151 x 55 3/4 inches (130.6 x 383.6 x 141.8 cm)

#4. Eternity, 2002-2004

Phillips London: 13 October 2007
Estimated: GBP 2,500,000 – 3,500,000
GBP 4,724,000 / USD 9,597,354

Damien Hirst – Contemporary Art Eve… Lot 239 October 2007 | Phillips

#5. Fragments of Paradise, 2008

Sotheby’s London: 15 September 2008
Estimated: GBP 1,000,000 – 1,500,000
GBP 5,193,250 / USD 9,282,130

(#51) Damien Hirst (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST
Fragments of Paradise, 2008
Stainless steel and glass with manufactured diamonds
72 1/8 x 108 1/2 x 4 inches (183.3 x 275.5 x 10 cm)
Engraved with signature, title and date 2008 on the reverse

#6. Lullaby Winter, 2002

Christie’s New-York: 16 May 2007
Estimated: USD 2,500,000 – 3,500,000
USD 7,432,000

Damien Hirst (b. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Lullaby Winter, 2002
Glass, stainless steel and painted cast pills
72x108x4 inches (182.9 x 274.3 x 10.2 cm)

#7. The Void, 2000

Phillips New-York: 18 May 2007
Estimated: USD 5,000,000 – 7,000,000
USD 5,250,000

Damien Hirst – 20th Century & Contemporar… Lot 8 May 2017 | Phillips

#8. Happy Life Blossom, 2018

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2022
Estimated: USD 2,000,000 – 3,000,000
USD 5,609,900

Happy Life Blossom | The Now Evening Auction | 2022 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Happy Life Blossom, 2018
Oil on canvas, in two parts
Each: 108 x 72.2 inches (274.2 x 183.3 cm)
Signed, titled, dated and variously inscribed (on the reverse left panel)
Titled, dated and variously inscribed (on the reverse right panel)

#9. Here Today, Gone Tomorrow, 2008

Sotheby’s London: 15 September 2008
Estimated: GBP 2,500,000 – 3,500,000
GBP 2,953,250 / USD 5,278,477

(#46) Damien Hirst (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST
Here Today, Gone Tomorrow, 2008
Glass, stainless steel, fish, fish skeletons, acrylic, MDF, paint and formaldehyde solution
80 1/4 x 144 7/8 x 144 7/8 inches (204x368x368 cm)

#10. Memories of / Moments With You, 2008

Sotheby’s London: 15 September 2008
Estimated: GBP 800,000 – 1,000,000
GBP 2,617,250 / USD 4,677,929

(#11) Damien Hirst (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST
Memories of / Moments With You, 2008
Gold-plated steel and glass with manufactured diamonds, diptych
Each:  35 7/8 x 54 x 4 inches (91 x 137.2 x 10 cm)
Each: engraved with signature, title and date 2008 on the reverse

 

 

 

 

PART II: AUCTION RESULTS

 

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2026 Auction Results

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Diethylene Glycol, 2006

Property from a Distinguished British Collector
Sotheby’s London: 5 March 2026
Estimated: GBP 250,000 – 350,000
GBP 307,200 / USD 410,390

Diethylene Glycol | Contemporary Day Auction | 2026 | Sotheby’s

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Diethylene Glycol, 2006
Household gloss on canvas
60×76 inches (152.4 x 193 cm)
Signed twice (on the stretcher)
Signed, titled and dated 2006 (on the reverse)

Argininamine, 1994

Bonhams London: 5 March 2026
Estimated: GBP 180,000 – 250,000
GBP 184,550 / USD 246,540
SPOT PAINTING

Bonhams : DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) Argininamine (Painted in 1994)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Argininamine, 1994
Household gloss on canvas
25×26 inches (63.5 x 66 cm)
Signed ‘Hirst’ (on the reverse)

Untitled, 2000

Modern Visionaries – The Roger and Josette Vanthournout Collection
Christie’s London: 6 March 2026
Estimated: GBP 150,000 – 200,000
GBP 127,000 / USD 169,660

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), Untitled | Christie’s

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Untitled, 2000
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
30×48 inches (76.2 x 121.9 cm)

Beautiful, Dental, Brushing, Full Mouth Rehabilitation, Mullish, Thank You Painting, circa 1995

Bonhams London: 5 March 2026
Estimated: GBP 120,000 – 180,000
GBP 140,100 / USD 246,540

Bonhams : DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) Beautiful, Dental, Brushing, Full Mouth Rehabilitation, Mullish, Thank You Painting (Painted circa 1995)

 

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Beautiful, Dental, Brushing, Full Mouth Rehabilitation, Mullish, Thank You Painting, circa 1995
Household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 48 inches (121.9 cm)

Beautiful Second Exploding Pale Blue Comet Impact Painting, 2001

Property from a Distinguished British Collector
Sotheby’s London: 5 March 2026
Estimated: GBP 120,000 – 180,000
GBP 153,600 / USD 205,195

Beautiful Second Exploding Pale Blue Comet Impact Painting | Contemporary Day Auction | 2026 | Sotheby’s

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Beautiful Second Exploding Pale Blue Comet Impact Painting, 2001
Household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 72 inches (183 cm)
Signed (on a label affixed to the stretcher)

 

 

 

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2025 Auction Results

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46 lots sold at auction in 2025 for a total turnover of USD 13,994,293. With 14 lots failing to sell, the sell-through rate is 77%. Momentary Love Blossom, a painting dated 2018, from The Collection of Laurence and Patrick Seguin in Paris, sold at Sotheby’s in New-York on 18 November 2025 for USD 3,040,000, the highest price paid at auction for a work by Damien Hirst in 2025.

2025 Top 3 Lots

2 lots sold for more than USD 1 million, generating a cumulative turnover of USD 5,268,000, representing 37.6% of the total turnover for 2025. 8 lots sold for more than USD 500,000, generating a cumulative turnover of USD 8,935,632, representing 63.8% of the total turnover for 2025.

#1. Momentary Love Blossom, 2018

Property from the Laurence and Patrick Seguin Collection, Paris
Sotheby’s New-York: 18 November 2025
Estimated: USD 2,500,000 – 3,500,000
USD 3,040,000
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

Momentary Love Blossom | The Now & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2025 | Sotheby’s

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Momentary Love Blossom, 2018
Oil on canvas
144×108 inches (365.8 x 274.3 cm)
Signed, titled, dated 2018 and variously inscribed (on the reverse)
Signed (on the stretcher)

#2. Veil of Life Everlasting, 2017

Christie’s New-York: 14 May 2025
Estimated: USD 1,500,000 – 2,000,000
USD 2,228,000
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), Veil of Life Everlasting | Christie’s

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Veil of Life Everlasting, 2017
Oil on canvas
Installation orientation variable
108×144 inches (274.3 x 365.8 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Damien Hirst Veil of Life Everlasting 2017’ (on the reverse)

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USD 1 million

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#3. Oranges and Lemons, 2008

Christie’s London: 26 June 2025
Estimated: GBP 500,000 – 700,000
GBP 504,000 / USD 690,480

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), Oranges and Lemons | Christie’s

REPEAT SALE

Sotheby’s London: 15 September 2008
Estimated: GBP 500,000 – 700,000
GBP 589,250 / USD 1,053,660

Results for “damien hirst oranges and lemons”

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Oranges and Lemons, 2008
Butterflies, cubic zirconia and household gloss on canvas, in two parts
Each: 84×84 inches (213.4 x 213.4 cm)
Overall: 84×168 inches (213.4 x 426.8 cm)
Each: signed, titled, inscribed and dated ‘Damien Hirst 2008 “Oranges and Lemons”‘ (on the reverse)

#4. Never Mind, 1990-1991

Christie’s London: 15 October 2025
Estimated: GBP 600,000 – 900,000
GBP 508,000 / USD 680,720
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), Never Mind | Christie’s

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Never Mind, 1990-1991
Glass, MDF, ramin, plastic, aluminium, resin and pharmaceutical packaging
54x40x9 inches (137.2 x 101.5 x 23 cm)

#5. A Summers Day, 2002

Christie’s London: 6 March 2025
Estimated: GBP 250,000 – 350,000
GBP 504,000 / USD 645,120

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), A Summers Day | Christie’s

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
A Summers Day, 2002
Household gloss and butterflies on canvas
96×108 inches (243.8 x 274.3 cm)

#6. Cesium Fluoride, 2004-2011

Phillips London: 6 March 2025
Estimated: GBP 400,000 – 600,000
GBP 444,500 / USD 568,960

Damien Hirst – Modern & Contemporary A… Lot 30 March 2025 | Phillips

#11. Adenosine Monophosphate, 2012

Property of an Important Private Collector
Phillips London: 3 December 2025
Estimated: GBP 200,000 – 300,000
GBP 264,450 / USD 349,600

Damien Hirst New Now: Modern & Contemporary Art

DAMIEN HIRST
Adenosine Monophosphate, 2012
Household gloss on canvas
67 7/8 x 59 7/8 inches (172.7 x 152.3 cm)
Signed ‘D Hirst’ on the stretcher
Signed, titled and dated ”Adenosine Monophosphate’ Damien Hirst 2012′ on the reverse

#22. Stillness Blossom, 2021

Sotheby’s Diriyah: 8 February 2025
Estimated: USD 80,000 – 120,000
USD 132,000

Stillness Blossom | Origins | 2025 | Sotheby’s

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Stillness Blossom, 2021
Oil on card
33 x 23 1/4 inches (84×59 cm)
Signed Damien Hirst, titled and dated 2021 (on the reverse)

#23. Alemethicin, 2012

Sotheby’s London: 5 March 2025
Estimated: GBP 80,000 – 120,000
GBP 88,900 / USD 113,792

Alemethicin | Contemporary Day Auction | 2025 | Sotheby’s

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Alemethicin, 2012
Household gloss on canvas
18 1/8 x 26 1/8 inches (46 x 66.2 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 2012 (on the reverse)

#24. Irrepressible Blossom, 2021

Sotheby’s Milan: 28 May 2025
Estimated: EUR 70,000 – 100,000
EUR 95,250 / USD 107,990

Irrepressible Blossom | Modern and Contemporary Art | 2025 | Sotheby’s

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Irrepressible Blossom, 2021
Oil on card
33 1/8 x 23 1/2 inches (84.2 x 59.6 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 2021 on the reverse

#25. Psalm 45: Eructavit cor meum, 2008

Christie’s London: 6 March 2025
Estimated: GBP 70,000 – 100,000
GBP 81,900 / USD 104,832

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), Psalm 45: Eructavit cor meum | Christie’s

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Psalm 45: Eructavit cor meum, 2008
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
18 1/8 x 18 1/8 inches (46×46 cm)
Signed, inscribed and dated ’45th Psalm Damien Hirst 2008′ (on the reverse)

#26. 4-Methylpyrimidine, 2003

Sotheby’s London: 24 January 2025
Estimated: GBP 60,000 – 80,000
GBP 84,000 / USD 103,770

4-Methylpyrimidine | Contemporary Discoveries | 2025 | Sotheby’s

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
4-Methylpyrimidine, 2003
Household gloss on canvas
19 7/8 x 16 inches (50.5 x 40.5 cm)
Signed (on the stretcher)
Signed, titled, dated 2003 and dedicated for Stephen thanks a Billion for Chalford Place nan (on the reverse)

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USD 100,000

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#27. Typhoid, 2003

Phillips London: 7 March 2025
Estimated: GBP 40,000 – 60,000
GBP 60,960 / USD 78,029

Damien Hirst – Modern & Contemporary … Lot 173 March 2025 | Phillips

REPEAT SALE

Phillips London: 13 October 2022
Estimated: GBP 60,000 – 80,000
GBP 69,300 / USD 76,875

Damien Hirst 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale

#30. PB442. Freeing Blossom, 2021

Phillips London: 26 June 2025
Estimated: GBP 35,000 – 45,000
GBP 53,340 / USD 73,075

Damien Hirst Modern & Contemporary Art: Evening & Day Sale

#31. Tempting Blossom – PB 459, 2021

#37. PB330. Sprouting Blossom, 2021

Phillips New-York: 25 September 2025
Estimated: USD 50,000 – 70,000
USD 53,540

Damien Hirst Modern & Contemporary Art

#39. N-t-Boc-I-Alanine, 1995

Christie’s London: 16 October 2025
Estimated: GBP 80,000 – 120,000
GBP 38,100 / USD 51,055

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), N-t-Boc-I-Alanine | Christie’s

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
N-t-Boc-I-Alanine, 1995
Household gloss on canvas
5 1/8 x 4 1/2 inches (13 x 11.5 cm) (1 inch spot)
Signed twice ‘Damien Hirst D Hirst’ (on the overlap)

#40. Tridodecylamine, 2016

Phillips London: 7 March 2025
Estimated: GBP 20,000 – 30,000
GBP 35,560 / USD 45,517

Damien Hirst – Modern & Contemporary … Lot 172 March 2025 | Phillips

#41. Second Series Biopsy: M865/302, M865/303, 2008

Christie’s London: 26 June 2025
Estimated: GBP 50,000 – 70,000
GBP 32,760 / USD 45,050

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), Second Series Biopsy: M865/302, M865/303 | Christie’s

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Second Series Biopsy: M865/302, M865/303, 2008
(i) M865/302
Inkjet print, glass, religious charms, flocking powder and household gloss on canvas
Signed, titled, inscribed and dated ‘Damien Hirst 2008 2nd Series Biopsy ‘M865/302’ (on the reverse)
Stamped with the artist’s monogram (on the overlap)
(ii) M865/303
Inkjet print, glass, religious charms, scalpel blades, flocking powder and household gloss on canvas
Signed, titled, inscribed and dated ‘Damien Hirst 2008 2nd Series Biopsy ‘M865/303’ (on the reverse)
Stamped with the artist’s monogram (on the overlap)
Each: 23 3/4 x 32 1/8 inches (60.8 x 81.4 cm)

#42. Untitled Paper Spin Gift for Heidi, 2009

Sotheby’s New-York: 28 February 2025
Estimated: USD 20,000 – 30,000
USD 40,640

Untitled Paper Spin Gift for Heidi | Contemporary Discoveries | 2025 | Sotheby’s

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Untitled Paper Spin Gift for Heidi, 2009
Acrylic on paper
46×34 inches (116.8 x 86.3 cm)
Signed, dated BALI 2009 and inscribed for Heidi (lower left)

#43. Saint Bartholomew-Exquisite Pain Maquette, 2008

Christie’s online: 16 December 2025
Estimated: USD 50,000 – 70,000
USD 40,640

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), Saint Bartholomew-Exquisite Pain Maquette | Christie’s

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Saint Bartholomew-Exquisite Pain Maquette, 2008
Sterling silver
35 1/4 x 15 x 11 inches (89.5 x 38.1 x 27.9 cm)
Incised with the artist’s signature, title and number
‘Saint Bartholomew Exquisite Pain DShirst 5/15’
(on the base)
This work is number five from an edition of fifteen

#44. M132/727-Lung_cancer-SPL.jpg, 2007

Christie’s online: 16 December 2025
Estimated: USD 40,000 – 60,000
USD 38,100

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), M132/727-Lung_cancer-SPL.jpg | Christie’s

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
M132/727-Lung_cancer-SPL.jpg, 2007
Household gloss, glass, hair, blades and teeth on pre-primed acrylic polyester canvas
69 x 47 1/2 inches (175.3 x 120.7 cm)
Signed, inscribed, titled and dated
‘”M132727-lung-cancer-SPL.jpg” Damien Hirst Biopsy Painting 2007’
(on the reverse)
Signed again and stamped with the artist’s monogram ‘Damien Hirst’ (on the stretcher)
Stamped again with the artist’s monogram (on the overlap)

#45. Maltase, 2013

Sotheby’s London: 24 January 2025
Estimated: GBP 25,000 – 35,000
GBP 28,800 / USD 35,575

Maltase | Contemporary Discoveries | 2025 | Sotheby’s

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Maltase, 2013
Household gloss on canvas
12×10 inches (30.6 x 25.5 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 2013 (on the reverse)

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Lots Passed

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Happy, Happy, Harvest, 2006

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 November 2025
Estimated: HKD 1,500,000 – 3,000,000
PASSED

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), Happy, Happy, Harvest | Christie’s

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Happy, Happy, Harvest, 2006
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas (triptych)
Each: 36×36 inches (91.4 x 91.4 cm) (3)
Overall: 36×108 inches (91.4 x 274.2 cm)
Each signed, titled, inscribed and dated
‘Damien Hirst Happy, Happy, Harvest triptych 2006’
Numbered respectively
(on the reverse)

Giddy Blossom, 2021

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 26 November 2025
Estimated: HKD 400,000 – 600,000
PASSED

Damien Hirst 達米恩・赫斯特 | Giddy Blossom 狂喜的花朵 | Modern & Contemporary Discoveries | 2025 | Sotheby’s

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Giddy Blossom, 2021
Oil on card
23 1/4 x 16 1/2 inches (59 x 41.8 cm)
Numbered PB558 (on the label affixed to the reverse)
Signed, titled, dated 2021 (on the reverse)

Christie’s New-York: 30 September 2025
Estimated: USD 250,000 – 350,000
PASSED

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), Ethylene Glycol Chitin | Christie’s

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Ethylene Glycol Chitin, 2008
Household gloss on canvas
47×25 inches (119.4 x 61 cm)
Stamped twice with the artist’s monogram (on the overlap)
Signed ‘Damien Hirst’ (on the stretcher)
Signed again, titled and dated ‘Damien Hirst 2008 “Ethylene Glycol Chitin”‘ (on the reverse)

The Body of Christ, 2005

Property from the Collection of Ella Fontanals-Cisneros with Proceeds to partially Benefit the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO)
Sotheby’s New-York: 26 September 2025
Estimated: USD 800,000 – 1,200,000
PASSED

The Body of Christ | Contemporary Curated | 2025 | Sotheby’s

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
The Body of Christ, 2005
Glass, stainless steel, steel, aluminum, nickel, paracetamol pills and blood
72 7/8 x 47 3/8 x 4 inches (185.3 x 120.3 x 10.2 cm)

Sexy Love, 2007

Phillips London: 17 July 2025
Estimated: GBP 180,000 – 250,000
PASSED

Damien Hirst Hoarder VI: The Migration

Invocation, 2006

Phillips London: 26 June 2025
Estimated: GBP 400,000 – 600,000
PASSED

Damien Hirst Modern & Contemporary Art: Evening & Day Sale

Two Skulls, 2006

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2025
Estimated: USD 100,000 – 150,000
PASSED

Two Skulls | Contemporary Day Auction | 2025 | Sotheby’s

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Two Skulls, 2006
Oil on canvas
36 1/8 x 48 1/4 inches (91.9 x 122.6 cm)
Signed, titled, dated 2006 and inscribed Death Shmeth! (on the reverse)

Two Garudas, 2013

Phillips New-York: 14 May 2025
Estimated: USD 200,000 – 300,000
PASSED

Damien Hirst Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session

Ascent, 2018

Phillips London: 6 March 2025
Estimated: GBP 500,000 – 700,000
PASSED

Damien Hirst – Modern & Contemporary A… Lot 26 March 2025 | Phillips

Propionic Anhydride, 2008

Sotheby’s New-York: 26 February 2025
Estimated: USD 200,000 – 300,000
PASSED

Propionic Anhydride | Contemporary Curated | 2025 | Sotheby’s

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Propionic Anhydride, 2008
Household glass on canvas
30×58 inches (76.2 x 147.3 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 2008 (on the reverse)
Signed (on the stretcher)

Faithless, 2005

Sotheby’s New-York: 8 February 2025
Estimated: USD 400,000 – 600,000
PASSED

Faithless | Origins | 2025 | Sotheby’s

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Faithless, 2005
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas in artist’s chosen frame
48 x 95 7/8 inches (121.9 x 243.8 cm)
Signed Damien Hirst twice, titled and dated 2005 (on the reverse)

---

Lots Withdrawn

---

Untitled (Nick), 1999

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 November 2025
Estimated: USD 600,000 – 800,000
WITHDRAWN

Untitled (Nick) | Contemporary Day Auction | 2025 | Sotheby’s

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Untitled (Nick), 1999
Household gloss on canvas
68×76 inches (172.7 x 193 cm)
Signed, dedicated For Nick (etc.) and inscribed ♡ (on the reverse)

The Tree of Life, 2007

Phillips London: 16 October 2025
Estimated: GBP 400,000 – 600,000
WITHDRAWN

Damien Hirst Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

Tulips – And I am Aware of my Heart It Opens and Closes, 2006

Beautiful Faunus Prophecy Painting, 2007

Christie’s New-York: 27 February 2025
Estimated: USD 150,000 – 200,000
WITHDRAWN

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), Beautiful Faunus Prophecy Painting | Christie’s

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Beautiful Faunus Prophecy Painting, 2007
Household gloss on canvas
72×72 inches (182.9 x 182.9 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Damien Hirst 2007 “Beautiful Faunus Prophecy Painting”‘ (on the reverse)
Signed again and stamped with the artist’s monogram ‘Damien Hirst’ (on the stretcher)
Stamped again with the artist’s monogram (on the overlap)

 

---

2024 Auction Results

---

45 lots sold at auction in 2024 for a total turnover of USD 14,517,539. With 11 lots failing to sell, the sell-through rate is 80%. The highest price has been achieved at Christie’s in London on 9 October 2024, when Assumption, a painting dated 2012 sold for GBP 945,000 (USD 1,237,950), one of only 2 lots that sold for more than USD 1 million.

2024 Top 3 Lots

10 lots sold for more than USD 500,000, generating a cumulative turnover of USD 8,010,075, representing 54.2% of the total turnover for 2024.

 

 

#1. Assumption, 2012

Christie’s London: 9 October 2024
Estimated: GBP 450,000 – 650,000
GBP 945,000 / USD 1,237,950

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), Assumption | Christie’s

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Assumption, 2012
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas in artist’s frame
94 1/2  x 71 inches (240 x 180.3 cm)
Signed ‘Damien Hirst’ (on the stretcher)
Signed, titled, stamped with the artist’s monogram and dated ‘Damien Hirst 2012 Assumption’ (on the reverse)

#2. Veil of Serendipity, 2017

Christie’s London: 7 March 2024
Estimated: GBP 650,000 – 850,000
GBP 819,000 / USD 1,038,492

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), Veil of Serendipity | Christie’s (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Veil of Serendipity, 2017
Oil on canvas
66×45 inches (167.8 x 114.3 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Damien Hirst Veil of Serendipity 2017’ (on the reverse)

---

USD 1 million

---

#3. Ocean Spray, 2016

Christie’s New-York: 14 May 2024
Estimated: USD 350,000 – 550,000
USD 882,000

23171 Hirst, Ocean Spray (shorthandstories.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Ocean Spray, 2016
Household gloss on canvas
67×79 inches (170×200 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘2016 ‘Ocean Spray’ Damien Hirst’ (on the reverse)
Signed again ‘Damien Hirst’ (on the stretcher)

#4. Creed, 2006

Phillips London: 27 June 2024
Estimated: GBP 500,000 – 700,000
GBP 685,800 / USD 869,594

https://www.phillips.com/detail/damien-hirst/UK010424/18

#5. Ergonovine, 2005

Sotheby’s New-York: 1 March 2024
Estimated: USD 500,000 – 700,000
USD 762,000

Ergonovine | Contemporary Curated | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Ergonovine, 2005
Household gloss on canvas (12-inch spot), 2005
84×84 inches (213.4 x 213.4 cm)

#6. Cupric Nitrate, 2007

Phillips London: 7 March 2024
Estimated: GBP 500,000 – 700,000
GBP 571,500 / USD 724,662

Damien Hirst – 20th Century & Contempo… Lot 28 March 2024 | Phillips

#7. Pyrene, 2017

Sotheby’s London: 6 March 2024
Estimated: GBP 380,000 – 450,000
GBP 533,400 / USD 676,351

Pyrene | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction featuring The Now | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Pyrene, 2017
Household gloss on canvas
99×111 inches (251.5 x 281.9 cm) (3 inch spot)
Signed (on the stretcher); signed, titled twice and dated 2017 (on the reverse)

#8. Lovely and Kind, 2001

Ravenel Taipei: 1 December 2024
Estimated: TWD 12,000,000 – 22,000,000
TWD 21,600,000 / USD 665,230

Ravenel | Damien HIRST《Lovely and Kind》 Ravenel Autumn Auction 2024 Taipei Lot 062

DAMIEN HIRST (British, 1965)
Lovely and Kind, 2001
Household gloss on canvas with butterflies
42 5/8 x 51 3/8 inches (108.2 x 130.3 cm)
Signed reverse Damien Hirst, titled Lovely and Kind and dated 2001

#9. Omnipotence, 2008

Phillips London: 10 October 2024
Estimated: GBP 350,000 – 450,000
GBP 444,500 / USD 582,595

Damien Hirst – Modern & Contemporary… Lot 33 October 2024 | Phillips

REPEAT SALE

Phillips London: 14 October 2022
Estimated: GBP 350,000 – 450,000
GBP 796,900 / USD 893,385

Damien Hirst 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

#10. Visionary, 2008

Sotheby’s New-York: 14 May 2024
Estimated: USD 400,000 – 600,000
USD 571,500

Visionary | Contemporary Day Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Visionary, 2008
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas, in artist’s chosen frame
Diameter: 60 inches (152.4 cm)
Titled and dated 2008 (on the reverse); signed (on the stretcher)

---

USD 500,000

---

#11. Lumichrome, 2005

Sotheby’s New-York: 14 May 2024
Estimated: USD 200,000 – 300,000
USD 406,400

Lumichrome | Contemporary Day Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Lumichrome, 2005
Household gloss on canvas (2-inch spot)
34×34 inches (86.3 x 86.3 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 2005 (on the reverse); signed (on the stretcher)

#12. Beautiful, red, edgy, ejaculating, pooh, comet, purple, spunk painting, 1997

Sotheby’s Paris: 23 April 2024
Estimated: EUR 220,000 – 320,000
EUR 381,000 / USD 405,950

beautiful, red, edgy, ejaculating, pooh, comet, purple, spunk painting | Art Moderne et Contemporain Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

REPEAT SALE 

Phillips New-York: 16 November 2022
Estimated: USD 300,000 – 500,000
USD 365,400

Damien Hirst – 20th Century & Cont… Lot 347 November 2022 | Phillips

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Beautiful, red, edgy, ejaculating, pooh, comet, purple, spunk painting, 1997
Household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 84 inches (213.4 cm)

---

USD 400,000

---

#13. Beijing, 2014

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 2,500,000 – 3,500,000
HKD 3,024,000 / USD 387,350

https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6486635

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Beijing, 2014
Scalpel blades, skin graft blades, razor blades, zips, pins, safety pins and gloss paint on canvas
72 x 107 7/8 inches (182.9 x 274 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Damien Hirst Beijing 2014’ (on the reverse)

#14. Beautiful Architect, 2003

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 11 November 2024
Estimated: HKD 3,500,000 – 5,500,000
HKD 3,000,000 / USD 385,810

Damien Hirst 達米恩 · 赫斯特 | Beautiful Architect 美麗的締造者 | Modern & Contemporary Day Auction | Session 1 – Contemporary Art | 2024 | Sotheby’s

REPEAT SALE

Sotheby’s London: 30 June 2022
Estimated: GBP 400,000 – 600,000
GBP 882,000 / USD 1,072,470

Beautiful Architect | Modern & Contemporary Day Auction | 2022 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Beautiful Architect, 2003
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
63×63 inches (160×160 cm)

#15. Norcodeine, 1993

Christie’s New-York: 22 November 2024
Estimated: USD 400,000 – 600,000
USD 378,000

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), Norcodeine | Christie’s

#16. Beautiful Squawk Painting (with Butterflies), 2007

Christie’s London: 9 March 2024
Estimated: GBP 120,000 – 180,000
GBP 277,200 / USD 351,490

Damien Hirst (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Beautiful Squawk Painting (with Butterflies), 2007
Household gloss and butterflies on canvas
36×36 inches (91×91 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Damien Hirst “Beautiful Squawk Painting” 2007’ (on the reverse)

#17. Untitled (Birthday Card), 1999

Phillips London: 11 October 2024
Estimated: GBP 250,000 – 350,000
GBP 254,000 / USD 332,740

Damien Hirst – Modern & Contemporar… Lot 151 October 2024 | Phillips

REPEAT SALE

Christie’s New-York: 11 November 2004
Estimated: USD 200,000 – 300,000
USD 231,500

Damien Hirst (b.1965) , Untitled (Birthday Card) | Christie’s

#18. I Need You, 1998

Christie’s London: 7 March 2024
Estimated: GBP 220,000 – 280,000
GBP 252,000 / USD 319,536

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), I Need You | Christie’s (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
I Need You, 1998
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
36×40 inches (91.4 x 101.6 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘I need you. 98. Damien Hirst’ (on the overlap)
Signed ‘D Hirst’ (on the stretcher)

---

USD 300,000

---

#19. Beautiful tasty painting, 1996

Sotheby’s New-York: 1 March 2024
Estimated: USD 250,000 – 350,000
USD 279,400

beautiful tasty painting | Contemporary Curated | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Beautiful tasty painting, 1996
household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 72 inches (182.9 cm)

#20. Beautiful celebration at least through a superficial universe painting, with diamonds, 2001

Sotheby’s London: 7 March 2024
Estimated: GBP 180,000 – 250,000
GBP 190,500 / USD 241,554

beautiful celebration at least through a superficial universe painting, with diamonds | Modern & Contemporary Day Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Beautiful celebration at least through a superficial universe painting, with diamonds, 2001
Household gloss and glitter on canvas
Diameter: 84 inches (213.4 cm)
Incised twice with the artist’s signature (lower right and center left)

#21. Horizon Grey, 2016

Sotheby’s New-York: 21 November 2024
Estimated: USD 300,000 – 400,000
USD 240,000

Horizon Grey | Contemporary Day Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Horizon Grey, 2016
Household gloss on canvas
120×96 inches (304.8 x 243.8 cm)
Signed, titled, dated 2016 and inscribed Colour Space (on the reverse)

#22. Beautiful Faunus Prophecy Painting, 2007

Christie’s New-York: 13 March 2024
Estimated: USD 250,000 – 350,000
USD 226,800

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), Beautiful Faunus Prophecy Painting | Christie’s (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Beautiful Faunus Prophecy Painting, 2007
Household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 72 inches (182.9 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Damien Hirst 2007 “Beautiful Faunus Prophecy Painting”‘ (on the reverse)
Signed again and stamped with the artist’s monogram ‘Damien Hirst’ (on the stretcher)
Stamped again with the artist’s monogram (on the overlap)

#23. Peony Pink, 2016

Sotheby’s London: 7 March 2024
Estimated: GBP 100,000 – 150,000
GBP 177,800 / USD 225,450

Peony Pink | Modern & Contemporary Day Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Peony Pink, 2016
Household gloss on canvas
36×54 inches (91.4 x 137.2 cm)
Signed (on the stretcher); signed, titled and dated 2016 (on the reverse)

#24. Midas Asteroid, 2007

Phillips London: 4 December 2024
Estimated: GBP 150,000 – 200,000
GBP 177,800 / USD 225,345

Damien Hirst – New Now: Modern & Co… Lot 14 December 2024 | Phillips

#25. Forget, 2003

Sotheby’s London: 26 June 2024
Estimated: GBP 150,000 – 200,000
GBP 156,000 / USD 197,808

https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2024/contemporary-art-day-auction-including-the-ralph-i-goldenberg-collection/forget

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Forget, 2003
Household gloss on canvas with gold leaf
80 1/2 x 99 inches (204.5 x 251.4 cm (1 inch spot)

Damien Hirst – New Now: Modern & Co… Lot 19 December 2024 | Phillips

#27. N-Hydroxymaleimide, 2010

Christie’s New-York: 17 May 2024
Estimated: USD 150,000 – 250,000
USD 176,400

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), N-Hydroxymaleimide | Christie’s (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
N-Hydroxymaleimide, 2010
Household gloss on canvas
19×25 inches (48.3 x 63.5 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Damien Hirst 2010 ‘N-Hydroxymaleimide” (on the reverse)
Signed again ‘D Hirst’ (on the stretcher)

#28. Beautiful Viracocha Confabulation Painting for Steve (with Diamonds), 2011

Phillips London: 11 October 2024
Estimated: GBP 150,000 – 200,000
GBP 127,000 / USD 165,880

Damien Hirst – Modern & Contemporar… Lot 118 October 2024 | Phillips

#29. Controlled Substance Key Painting (1 inch spot), 1994

Bonhams London: 21 March 2024
Estimated: GBP 60,000 – 80,000
GBP 102,000 / USD 130,495

Bonhams : DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) Controlled Substance Key Painting (1 inch spot) 1994

REPEAT SALE

China Guardian Beijing: 13 June 203
Estimated: CNY 1,000,000 – 1,500,000
CNY 1,150,000 / USD 160,655

Auctions – Lot details

#30. Psalm 2: quare fremuerunt gentes?, 2008

Sotheby’s Milan: 12 April 2024
Estimated: EUR 80,000 – 120,000
EUR 114,300 / USD 122,570

Psalm 2: quare fremuerunt gentes? | Modern & Contemporary Art | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

REPEAT SALE

Christie’s London: 16 October 2021
Estimated: GBP 70,000 – 100,000
GBP 125,000 / 171,475

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), Psalm 2: Quare fremuerunt gentes? | Christie’s

 

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Psalm 2: quare fremuerunt gentes?, 2008
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 18 inches (45.7 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 2008 on the reverse

#31. Beautiful Hathor Erotomania Intense Painting (with Extra Inner Beauty) and Beautiful Ceres Intense Anhedonia Painting (with Extra Inner Beauty), 2008

Sotheby’s London: 2 August 2024
Estimated: GBP 50,000 – 70,000
GBP 96,000 / USD 122,140

i: Beautiful Hathor Erotomania Intense Painting (with Extra Inner Beauty) ii: Beautiful Ceres Intense Anhedonia Painting (with Extra Inner Beauty) | Contemporary Discoveries | 2024 | Sotheby’s

REPEAT SALE

Sotheby’s London: 16 September 2008
Estimated: GBP 120,000 – 150,000
GBP 91,250 / USD 162,415

(#284) Damien Hirst

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
i: Beautiful Hathor Erotomania Intense Painting (with Extra Inner Beauty), 2008
ii: Beautiful Ceres Intense Anhedonia Painting (with Extra Inner Beauty), 2008
Household gloss on canvas
Each: 24×12 inches (61 x 30.5 cm)
Each signed, titled and dated 2008 (on the reverse)

#32. Psalm 6: Domine, ne in furore, 2008

Phillips London: 11 October 2024
Estimated: GBP 70,000 – 100,000
GBP 88,900 / USD 116,115

Damien Hirst – Modern & Contemporar… Lot 201 October 2024 | Phillips

DAMIEN HIRST
Psalm 6: Domine, ne in furore, 2008
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
17 7/8 x 17 7/8 inches (45.7 x 45.7 cm)
Signed, inscribed and dated ‘6th Psalm Damien Hirst 2008’ on the backboard

#33. Heavens Blossom, 2021

Sotheby’s Milan: 23 May 2024
Estimated: EUR 80,000 – 120,000
EUR 96,000 / USD 103,945

Heavens Blossom | Contemporary Discoveries | 2024 | Sotheby’s

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Heavens Blossom, 2021
Oil on card mounted on birch ply frame with canvas webbing around the edges
23 1/2 x 16 5/8 inches (59.6 x 42.1 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 2021 on the reverse

#34. 5-Iodouracil, 2001

Rago: 22 May 2024
Estimated: USD 90,000 – 100,000
USD 100,800

112: DAMIEN HIRST, 5-Iodouracil < Post War & Contemporary Art, 22 May 2024 < Auctions | Rago Auctions (ragoarts.com)

Rago: 24 September 2024
Estimated: USD 100,000 – 150,000
USD 94,500

104: DAMIEN HIRST, Beautiful the Eye of the Beholder Let the Story Unfold Painting < Post War & Contemporary Art, 24 September 2024 < Auctions | Rago Auctions

#36. PB820. Jazzy Blossom, 2021

#38. Beautiful Idun Narcissism Painting, 2008

Christie’s New-York: 1 October 2024
Estimated: USD 70,000 – 100,000
USD 88,200

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), Beautiful Idun Narcissism Painting | Christie’s

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Beautiful Idun Narcissism Painting, 2008
Household gloss on canvas
36×36 inches (91.4 x 91.4 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Damien Hirst 2008 “Beautiful Idun Narcissism Painting”‘ (on the reverse)
Signed again and stamped with the artist’s monogram ‘D Hirst’ (on the stretcher)
Stamped again with the artist’s monogram (on the overlap)

#39. Amusing Blossom, 2021

Sotheby’s New-York: 27 September 2024
Estimated: USD 80,000 – 120,000
USD 60,000

Amusing Blossom | Contemporary Curated | 2024 | Sotheby’s

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Amusing Blossom, 2021
Oil on card mounted on birch ply frames, with canvas webbing around the edges
23 1/2 x 16 1/2 inches (59.7 x 41.9 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 2021 (on the reverse)

#40. Harmonious Veil, 2019

Sotheby’s London: 7 March 2024
Estimated: GBP 40,000 – 60,000
GBP 44,450 / USD 56,363

Harmonious Veil | Modern & Contemporary Day Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Harmonious Veil, 2019
Oil on card laid down on canvas
23 3/8 x 16 5/8 inches (59.4 x 42.2 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 2019 (on the reverse)

#41. A Tangy Orange Kiss, 2006

Christie’s London: 10 October 2024
Estimated: GBP 30,000 – 50,000
GBP 37,800 / USD 49,390

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), A Tangy Orange Kiss | Christie’s

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
A Tangy Orange Kiss, 2006
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
12×16 inches (30.5 x 40.6 cm)
Signed and dated ‘Damien Hirst 2006’ (on the overlap)

#42. A Playful Bubblegum Kiss, 2006

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 29 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 300,000 – 500,000
HKD 378,000 / USD 48,390

https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6486339

REPEAT SALE

Christie’s New-York: 14 May 2021
Estimated: USD 40,000 – 60,000
USD 90,000

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), A Playful Bubblegum Kiss | Christie’s

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
A Playful Bubblegum Kiss, 2006
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
12×16 inches (30.5 x 40.6 cm)
Signed and dated ‘Damien Hirst 2006’ (on the overlap)

#43. Night Blossom – PB 506, 2021

Sotheby’s London: 2 August 2024
Estimated: GBP 30,000 – 40,000
GBP 36,000 / USD 45,800

Night Blossom – PB 506 | Contemporary Discoveries | 2024 | Sotheby’s

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Night Blossom – PB 506, 2021
Oil on card mounted on birch ply frame, with canvas webbing around the edges
23 1/2 x 16 5/8 inches (59.5 x 42 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 2021 (on the verso)

#44. PV74. Lucid Veil, 2019

Phillips London: 4 December 2024
Estimated: GBP 30,000 – 50,000
GBP 30,480 / USD 38,630

Damien Hirst – New Now: Modern & Co… Lot 26 December 2024 | Phillips

#45. Breast Feeding, 2006

Sotheby’s London: 26 June 2024
Estimated: GBP 30,000 – 40,000
GBP 21,600 / USD 27,389

https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2024/contemporary-art-day-auction-including-the-ralph-i-goldenberg-collection/breast-feeding

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Breast Feeding, 2006
Oil on canvas
12×9 inches (30.5 x 22.9 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 2006 (on the overlap)

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Lots Passed

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Lion and Serpent, 2010

Christie’s New-York: 22 November 2024
Estimated: USD 150,000 – 200,000
PASSED

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), Lion and Serpent | Christie’s

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Lion and Serpent, 2010
Painted silver, with marble pedestal
Sculpture: 11 3/4 x 11 x 8 1/4 inches (29.9 x 27.9 x 21 cm)
Overall: 62 7/8 x 17 3/4 x 17 3/4 inches (159.7 x 45.1 x 45.1 cm)
Stamped with the artist’s signature and number ‘D. Hirst 3⁄3’ (on the underside)
This work is number three from an edition of three plus two artist’s proofs

Christie’s London: 10 October 2024
Estimated: GBP 30,000 – 50,000
PASSED

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
A Bossa Nova Green Kiss, 2006
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
12 x 15 7/8 inches (30.5 x 40.4 cm)
Signed and dated ‘Damien Hirst 2006’ (on the overlap)

 

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2023 Auction Results

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50 lots sold at auction in 2023 for a total turnover of USD 22,264,139. With 9 lots failing to sell, the sell-through rate is 85%. The highest price of 2023 was achieved for a Medicine Cabinet at Christie’s in New-York on 9 March 2023 that sold for USD 2,220,000. Only three lots sold for over USD 1 million in 2023.

2023 Top 3 Lots

The Top 15 lots generated a cumulative turnover of USD 14,135,380, contributing 63.5% to the total turnover for 2023.

 

#1. The Sleep of Reason, 1997-1998

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
The Sleep of Reason, 1997-1998
Glass, stainless steel, steel, nickel, brass, rubber and pharmaceutical packaging
Overall: 98 x 144 7/8 x 11 1/4 inches (249 x 368 x 28.6 cm)

#2. I am Become Death, Shatterer of Worlds, 2006

Christie’s London: 13 October 2023
Estimated: GBP 1,500,000 – 2,500,000
GBP 1,492,000 / USD 1,810,679
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

Damien Hirst (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
I am Become Death, Shatterer of Worlds, 2006
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
84 1/8 x 210 inches (213.4 x 533.4 cm)
Signed three times, titled and dated
‘Damien Hirst “I am Become Death, Shatterer of Worlds” D Hirst D Hirst 2006’ (on the reverse)

#3. Veil of Imagination, 2017

Christie’s New-York: 7 November 2023
Estimated: USD 1,000,000 – 1,500,000
USD 1,260,000
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Veil of Imagination, 2017
Oil on canvas
72×48 inches (182.9 x 121.9 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Damien Hirst 2017 ‘Veil of Imagination” (on the reverse)
Signed again ‘D. Hirst’ (on the stretcher)

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USD 1 million

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#4. Covenant, 2007

Phillips New-York: 14 November 2023
Estimated: USD 700,000 – 1,000,000
USD 952,500
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

Damien Hirst – 20th Century & Conte… Lot 48 November 2023 | Phillips

#5. Cardura Doxazosin, 1992

Christie’s London: 28 February 2023
Estimated: GBP 500,000 – 700,000
GBP 787,500 / USD 952,467
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

DAMIEN HIRST (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Cardura Doxazosin, 1992
Household gloss on canvas
83 7/8 x 72 inches (213×183 cm) (4 inch spot)

#6. Reconciliation, 2018

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 700,000 – 1,000,000
USD 927,100
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

Damien Hirst – 20th Century & Contempora… Lot 19 May 2023 | Phillips

 

#7. Ulysses, 2008

Christie’s London: 13 October 2023
Estimated: GBP 600,000 – 800,000
GBP 756,000 / USD 917,475
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

Damien Hirst (christies.com)

 

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Ulysses, 2008
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 84 inches (213.3 cm)
Signed, titled twice and dated ‘ULYSSES 2008 Damien Hirst ‘Ulysses” (on the reverse)

#8. The Severed Head of Medusa, 2013

Christie’s London: 7 December 2023
Estimated: GBP 500,000 – 700,000
GBP 567,000 / USD 711,980
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
The Severed Head of Medusa, 2013
Gold, silver, in artist’s display cabinet
Sculpture: 12 5/8 x 15 5/8 x 15 5/8 inches (32 x 39.7 x 39.7 cm)
Display cabinet: 94 1/2 x 31 1/2 x 31 1/2 inches (240x80x80 cm)
Stamped with the artist’s signature, number, date and foundry mark ‘Damien Hirst 2⁄3 MMX111’
(on the underside)
This work is number two from an edition of three plus two artist’s proofs

#9. A Collection of Helmets and Swords (with Scabbards)
from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, 2010

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2023
Estimated: USD 600,000 – 800,000
USD 698,500
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

A Collection of Helmets and Swords (with Scabbards) from the Wreck of the Unbelievable | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b.1965)
A Collection of Helmets and Swords (with Scabbards) from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, 2010
Glass, powder-coated aluminum, painted MDF, silicone, stainless steel and bronze
94 1/2 x 122 x 20 3/4 inches (240x310x53 cm)
This work is number 2 from an edition of 3 plus 2 artist’s proofs

#11. I Love You More Than Words Can Say, 1999

Sotheby’s London: 1 March 2023
Estimated: GBP 300,000 – 500,000
GBP 508,000 / USD 611,385
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

I Love You More Than Words Can Say | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
I Love You More Than Words Can Say, 1999
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 84 inches (213.4 cm)

#12. Grecian Nude, 2013

Sotheby’s London: 28 June 2023
Estimated: GBP 400,000 – 600,000
GBP 508,000 / USD 606,494
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

Grecian Nude | Modern & Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Grecian Nude, 2013
Bronze
76 1/4 x 25 5/8 x 19 1/8 inches (193.8 x 65 x 48.5 cm)
Incised with the artist’s signature, dated 2013
Stamped with the foundry and Treasures stamps and numbered 1/3
This work is number 1 from an edition of 3, plus 2 artist’s proofs

#13. Briareus, 2012

Phillips London: 2 March 2023
Estimated: GBP 400,000 – 600,000
GBP 457,200 / USD 545,845
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

Damien Hirst – 20th Century & Contempo… Lot 18 March 2023 | Phillips

#19. Five Antique Torsos, 2011

Phillips London: 13 October 2023
Estimated: GBP 300,000 – 500,000
GBP 317,500 / USD 385,315

Damien Hirst – 20th Century & Contem… Lot 37 October 2023 | Phillips

#20. Beautiful Dance with the Devil Painting, 2007

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2023
Estimated: USD 180,000 – 250,000
USD 381,000

Beautiful Dance with the Devil Painting | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

 

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Beautiful Dance with the Devil Painting, 2007
Household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 48 inches (121.9 cm)
Signed (on the stretcher); signed, titled and dated 2007 (on the reverse)

#21. Resurrection, 2016

Bonhams NY: 18 May 2023
Estimated: USD 300,000 – 500,000
USD 365,775

Bonhams : DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) Resurrection 2016

#22. Toddler’s Cloud, 2016

#23. Malic Dehydrogenase from Bovine Heart, 1999

Christie’s London: 14 October 2023
Estimated: GBP 250,000 – 350,000
GBP 283,500 / USD 343,761

Malic Dehydrogenase from Bovine Heart (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Malic Dehydrogenase from Bovine Heart, 1999
Household gloss on canvas
87×63 inches (221×160 cm) (3-inch spot)

#24. Ammonium Pentaborate, 2017

Sotheby’s London: 13 October 2023
Estimated: GBP 220,000 – 280,000
GBP 266,700 / USD 323,665

Ammonium Pentaborate | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Ammonium Pentaborate, 2017
Household gloss on canvas
51×57 inches (129.5 x 144.8 cm) (3-inch spot)
Signed (on the stretcher); signed, titled and dated 2017 (on the reverse)

#25. Trinity I, 2007

Christie’s New-York: 12 May 2023
Estimated: USD 250,000 – 350,000
USD 302,400

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Trinity I, 2007
Butterflies, household gloss and gold leaf on canvas, in three parts
Each: 54×36 inches (137.2 x 91.4 cm)
Overall: 54×108 inches (137.2 x 274.3 cm)
Signed and titled ‘Damien Hirst “The Trinity”‘ (on the reverse of each canvas)
Signed again and dated ‘Damien Hirst 2007’ (on each stretcher)

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USD 300,000

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#26. Aminolevulinic Acid, 2020

SBI Art Auction: 27 May 2023
Estimated: JPY 25,000,000 – 35,000,000
JPY 41,400,000 / USD 295,720

DAMIEN HIRST
Aminolevulinic Acid, 2020
Household gloss on canvas
45×39 inches (114.3 x 99.1 cm)

#27. Skull of a Unicorn, 2010

Sotheby’s London: 28 June 2023
Estimated: GBP 180,000 – 250,000
GBP 228,600 / USD 288,818

Skull of a Unicorn | Modern & Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Skull of a Unicorn, 2010
Silver
49.2 x 8.9 x 29.7 inches (125 x 22.6 x 75.5 cm)
Incised with the artist’s signature
Numbered 1/3 and stamped with the artist’s foundry stamp on the underside of the skull
This work is number 1 from an edition of 3, plus 2 artist’s proofs

#28. Decahydronaphthalene, 2019

Phillips London: 30 June 2023
Estimated: GBP 250,000 – 350,000
GBP 222,250 / USD 282,437

Damien Hirst – 20th Century to Now London Lot 35 June 2023 | Phillips

#29. Beautiful Intuition Raspberry Ripple Officer Dibble High Fidelity Insight and Hope Painting, 2017

Christie’s Shanghai: 23 September 2023
Estimated: CNY 1,300,000 – 1,800,000
CNY 2,016,000 / USD 276,904

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), Beautiful Intuition Raspberry Ripple Officer Dibble High Fidelity Insight and Hope Painting | Christie’s (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Beautiful Intuition Raspberry Ripple Officer Dibble High Fidelity Insight and Hope Painting, 2017
Household gloss on canvas
60×60 inches (152.4 x 152.4 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Damien hirst 2017 Beautiful Intuition Raspberry Ripple Officer Dibble High Fidelity Insight and Hope Painting’ (on the reverse)

#30. Beautiful Dreamer, 2008

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 2,000,000 – 3,000,000
HKD 2,159,000 / USD 275,028

Damien Hirst 達米恩・赫斯特 | Beautiful Dreamer 美麗的夢想家 | 50th Anniversary Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Beautiful Dreamer, 2008
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas, in 4 parts
Each: 24×18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
Overall: 24×72 inches (61 x 182.8 cm)
Each: signed, titled, dated 2008 and numbered 1/4, 2/4, 3/4 and 4/4 on the reverse, respectively

#31. Untitled Skull with Spine, 2007

Phillips London: 3 March 2023
Estimated: GBP 120,000 – 180,000
GBP 203,200 / USD 243,732

Damien Hirst – 20th Century & Contemp… Lot 155 March 2023 | Phillips

#32. Beautiful Persephone Psychedelia Painting, 2008

Phillips London: 12 October 2023
Estimated: GBP 150,000 – 200,000
GBP 190,500 / USD 232,629

Damien Hirst – 20th Century & Conte… Lot 198 October 2023 | Phillips

#33. Oxyuranus Microlepidotus, 1999

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2023
Estimated: USD 200,000 – 300,000
USD 215,900

Oxyuranus Microlepidotus | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Oxyuranus Microlepidotus, 1999
Household gloss on canvas
52×44 inches (132.1 x 111.8 cm)

#34. Love to You, 2007

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 6 October 2023
Estimated: HKD 1,200,000 – 1,800,000
HKD 1,651,000 / USD 210,812
REPEAT SALE

Damien Hirst 達米恩 · 赫斯特 | Love to You 對你的愛 | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Love to You, 2007
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 54 inches (137.2 cm)
Signed and titled on the stretcher

#35. Beautiful, Eye-Opening, Hallucination of Breathtaking Spectacular Trip Gift Painting for John, 2016

Sotheby’s London: 13 October 2023
Estimated: GBP 120,000 – 180,000
GBP 165,100 / USD 200,364

Beautiful, Eye-Opening, Hallucination of Breathtaking Spectacular Trip Gift Painting for John | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Beautiful, Eye-Opening, Hallucination of Breathtaking Spectacular Trip Gift Painting for John, 2016
Household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 72 inches (183 cm)
Signed (on the stretcher); signed, titled, dated 2016 and variously inscribed (on the reverse)

#36. Arbutin, 1994

Sotheby’s Zurich: 28 March 2023
Estimated: CHF120,000 – 180,000
CHF 177,800 / USD 193,323

Arbutin | A Friend to Artists: The Marisa Perret-Rezzonico Collection | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Arbutin, 1994
Gloss household paint on canvas (1-inch spot)
15×17 inches (38 x 43.2 cm)
Signed D. Hirst and dated 94 on the reverse

#37. Lauric Acid Behenyl Ester, 2009

Sotheby’s New-York: 28 September 2023
Estimated: USD 150,000 – 200,000
USD 190,500

Lauric Acid Behenyl Ester | Contemporary Curated | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Lauric Acid Behenyl Ester, 2009
Household gloss on canvas (1 inch spot)
29×33 inches (73.7 x 83.8 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 2009 (on the reverse)

#38. Behenyl Alcohol, 2001

Sotheby’s Singapore: 2 July 2023
Estimated: SGD 190,000 – 280,000
SGD 241,300 / USD 178,436

Damien Hirst 達米恩・赫斯特 | Behenyl Alcohol 山醇 | Modern & Contemporary Art | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Behenyl Alcohol, 2001
Household gloss on canvas (2 inch spot)
14×18 inches (35.6 x 45.7 cm)
Signed Damien Hirst, titled Behenyl Alcohol and dated 2001 (on the verso)
Marked with artist’s studio stamp and signed Dhirst (on the stretcher)

#39. Pratyahara, 2019

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 29 May 2023
Estimated: HKD 1,500,000 – 2,500,000
HKD 1,386,000 / USD 177,049

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Pratyahara, 2019
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 30 inches (76.2 cm)
Signed twice, titled, dated ‘Damien Hirst D Hirst Pratyahara 2019’ (on the reverse)

#40. Beautiful mid-air flying duck collision… Ow painting, 2007

Sotheby’s Paris: 22 June 2023
Estimated: EUR 120,000 – 180,000
EUR 158,750 / USD 173,877

Beautiful mid-air flying duck collision… Ow painting | Une Collection à 360° | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Beautiful mid-air flying duck collision… Ow painting, 2007
Household gloss on canvas
48×48 inches (122×122 cm)
Signed, dated 2007 and stamped with the studio mark on the reverse
Stamped with the studio mark on the stretcher

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Beautiful Pete Townshend Tune after Tune Painting, 2022
Household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 48 inches (121.9 cm)
Signed on the stretcher; signed, titled and dated 2022 on the reverse

#42. Tricaprylin, 2007

Phillips London: 3 March 2023
Estimated: GBP 80,000 – 120,000
GBP 114,300 / USD 137,099

Damien Hirst – 20th Century & Contemp… Lot 240 March 2023 | Phillips

REPEAT SALE

Sotheby’s New-York: 24 September 2014
USD 100,000 – 150,000
USD 125,000 

(#219) Damien Hirst

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Young Damien, 2008
Oil on canvas
54×72 inches (137.2 x 182.9 cm)
Signed twice, titled and dated 2008 on the reverse
Signed on the stretcher

#45. Cancer, 2008

Phillips New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 40,000 – 60,000
USD 107,950

Damien Hirst – 20th Century & Contempor… Lot 487 May 2023 | Phillips

#46. Time, 2019

Christie’s London: 29 June 2023
Estimated: GBP 80,000 – 120,000
GBP 75,600 / USD 95,370

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Time, 2019
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 24 inches (61 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Damien Hirst 2019 ‘Time” (on the reverse)

#48. Linolelaidoyl Chloride, 2012

Sotheby’s London: 18 April 2023
Estimated: GBP 50,000 – 70,000
GBP 60,960 / USD 75,707

Linolelaidoyl Chloride | Contemporary Curated | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Linolelaidoyl Chloride, 2012
Household gloss on canvas (3mm spot)
11 3/8 x 7 1/4 inches (29.1 x 18.3 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 2012 on the reverse

#49. 2-Azido-2-Deoxyuridine, 1995

Sotheby’s London: 13 October 2023
Estimated: GBP 50,000 – 70,000
GBP 60,960 / USD 73,980

2-Azido-2-Deoxyuridine | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
2-Azido-2-Deoxyuridine, 1995
Household gloss on canvas
9×8 inches (22.9 x 20.3 cm) (2-inch spot)
Signed and dedicated Thanks Terry love Damien (on the reverse)

#50. Behenic Acid, 1995

Christie’s London: 29 June 2023
Estimated: GBP 20,000 – 30,000
GBP 37,800 / USD 47,685

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Behenic Acid, 1995
Household gloss on canvas (3 inch spot)
7 3/4 x 9 1/8 inches (19.6 x 23.1 cm)
Signed and inscribed ‘Thanks Love Damien’ (on the reverse)

 

 

 

 

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2022 Auction Results

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44 lots sold at auction in 2022 for a total turnover of USD 33,731,876. With 9 lots failing to sell, the sell-through rate is 83%. The most expensive lot of 2022 is Happy Life Blossom, a gigantic canvas from the Cherry Blossom series sold at Sotheby’s in New-York on 19 May 2022 for USD 5,609,900.

2022 Top 3 Lots

8 lots sold for over USD 1 million. The Top 15 lots generated a cumulative turnover of USD 23,205,756, contributing 68.8% to the total turnover for 2022.

 

 

#1. Happy Life Blossom, 2018

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2022
Estimated: USD 2,000,000 – 3,000,000
USD 5,609,900
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

Happy Life Blossom | The Now Evening Auction | 2022 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Happy Life Blossom, 2018
Oil on canvas, in two parts
Each: 108 x 72.2 inches (274.2 x 183.3 cm)
Signed, titled, dated and variously inscribed (on the reverse left panel)
Titled, dated and variously inscribed (on the reverse right panel)

#2. Swimming Form in Endless Motion, 1993

Christie’s London: 1 March 2022
Estimated: GBP 1,400,000 – 1,800,000
GBP 1,722,000 / USD 2,293,248
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Swimming Form in Endless Motion, 1993
Acrylic, painted aluminum, shark and formaldehyde solution
36x144x72 inches (91 x 365.8 x 182 cm)

#3. Veil of Mother’s Tenderness, 2017

Christie’s New-York: 17 November 2022
Estimated: USD 1,000,000 – 1,500,000
USD 1,980,000
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Veil of Mother’s Tenderness, 2017
Oil on canvas
108×72 inches (274.3 x 189.2 cm)
Signed, titled and dated (on the reverse)

#4. We’re Afraid of Nothing, 1992

Sotheby’s London: 2 March 2022
Estimated: GPB 1,000,000 – 1,500,000
GBP 1,366,000 / USD 1,825,959
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

We’re Afraid of Nothing | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2022 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
We’re Afraid of Nothing, 1992
Glass, painted MDF, ramin, steel, aluminium, pharmaceutical packaging and step ladder
Cabinet: 183 x 274.5 x 30.5 cm (72x108x12 inches)
Ladder: 210x48x11 cm (82 1/2 x 18 7/8 x 4 1/4 inches)

#5. Aten, 2015

Christie’s London: 28 June 2022
Estimated: GBP 1,000,000 – 1,500,000
GBP 1,242,000 / USD 1,515,928
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Aten, 2015
Red marble, grey agate and gold leaf
50 1/8 x 25 3/8 x 25 3/4 inches (127.3 x 64.5 x 65.5 cm)
Incised with the artist’s signature, numbered and dated ‘Damien Hirst 3/3 MMXV TT62-3’ (on the underside)

#6. Ashtray Head/Fallen Empire, 1995

Christie’s London: 1 March 2022
Estimated: GBP 800,000 – 1,200,000
GBP 1,002,000 / USD 1,334,398
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Ashtray Head/Fallen Empire, 1995
Fiberglass, cow’s head, blood and flies
26x96x96 inches (65 x 243.8 x 243.8 cm)
Executed in 1995

#7. Barium Carbonate-13C, 2005-2008

Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection
Christie’s New-York: 10 November 2022
Estimated: USD 500,000 – 700,000
USD 1,260,000
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Barium Carbonate-13C, 2005-2008
Household gloss on canvas
97×97 inches (246.4 x 246.4 cm)
Signed and stamped (on the stretcher)
Signed, titled twice and dated (on the reverse)

#8. Beautiful Architect, 2003

Sotheby’s London: 30 June 2022
Estimated: GBP 400,000 – 600,000
GBP 882,000 / USD 1,072,470
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

Beautiful Architect | Modern & Contemporary Day Auction | 2022 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST  (B. 1965)
Beautiful Architect, 2003
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
63×63 inches (160×160 cm)

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USD 1 million

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#10. Edith, 2008-2009

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 28 April 2022
Estimated: HKD 1,600,000 – 2,400,000
HKD 7,560,000 / USD 963,499
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

Damien Hirst 達米恩 · 赫斯特 | Edith 伊迪絲 | Contemporary Day Auction | 2022 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Edith, 2008-2009
Butterflies, cubic zirconia and household gloss on canvas
55.2 x 55.2 inches (140×140 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 2008/09 on the reverse

#11. Yes, but how do you really feel, 1996

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 27 April 2022
Estimated: HKD 6,000,000 – 8,000,000
HKD 7,560,000 / USD 963,450
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

Damien Hirst 達米恩・赫斯特 | Yes, but how do you really feel 是的，但你的真實感受如何 | Contemporary Evening Auction | 2022 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

REPEAT SALE

Christie’s New-York: 15 November 2006
Estimated: USD 1,500,000 – 2,000,000
USD 1,472,000

Damien Hirst (B. 1965) , Yes, but how do you really feel | Christie’s

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Yes, but how do you really feel, 1996
Stainless steel, glass and six plastic skeletons
249x378x51 cm (98 x 138 7/8 x 20 1/8 inches)

#12. Beautiful, let’s go to la-la land and make out with all the top bollocks yum yums and drink sugary syrup liquid until we overdose on fucking bliss painting (without emotion), 1997

Christie’s New-York: 10 November 2022
Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection
Estimated: USD 300,000 – 500,000
USD 907,200

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Beautiful, let’s go to la-la land and make out with all the top bollocks yum yums and drink sugary syrup liquid until we overdose on fucking bliss painting (without emotion), 1997
Household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 120 inches (304.8 cm)

#13. Omnipotence, 2008

Phillips London: 14 October 2022
Estimated: GBP 350,000 – 450,000
GBP 796,900 / USD 893,385

Damien Hirst 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

 

#22. Omniscience, 2007

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 27 April 2022
Estimated: HKD 5,000,000 – 7,000,000
HKD 4,410,000 / USD 562,012

Damien Hirst 達米恩・赫斯特 | Omniscience 全知 | Contemporary Evening Auction | 2022 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

REPEAT SALE

Sotheby’s London: 10 February 2016
Estimated: GBP 400,000 – 600,000
GBP 461,000 / USD 667,260

(#43) Damien Hirst

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Omniscience, 2007
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
102×102 inches (258.6 x 258.6 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 2007 on the reverse

#23. Gospel, 2004

Sotheby’s London: 3 March 2022
Estimated: GBP 220,000 – 280,000
GBP 403,200 / USD 537,098

Gospel | Modern & Contemporary Day Auction | 2022 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Gospel, 2004
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
48×48 inches (121.9 x 121.9 cm)

#24. Can’t Buy Me Love, 2007

Sotheby’s New-York: 20 May 2022
Estimated: USD 120,000 – 180,000
USD 529,200

Can’t Buy Me Love | Contemporary Day Auction | 2022 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Can’t Buy Me Love, 2007
Butterflies and household gloss on shaped canvas
Diameter: 54 inches (137.2 cm)
Signed (on the stretcher); signed, titled and dated 2007 (on the reverse)

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 November 2022
Estimated: USD 600,000 – 800,000
USD 484,000

Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder | The Now Evening Auction | 2022 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder, 1998
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 84 inches (213.4 cm)

#26. Arginine Amidinase, 1994

Sotheby’s New-York: 20 May 2022
Estimated: USD 300,000 – 400,000
USD 478,800

Arginine Amidinase | Contemporary Day Auction | 2022 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Arginine Amidinase, 1994
Household gloss on canvas
34×30 inches (86.4 x 76.5 cm)
Signed and variously inscribed (on the reverse)

#27. Zinc Sulfide, 2004

Phillips London: 3 March 2022
Estimated: GBP 350,000 – 550,000
GBP 346,500 / USD 461,569

Damien Hirst – 20th Century & Contempo… Lot 38 March 2022 | Phillips

REPEAT SALE

Sotheby’s New-York: 15 May 2013
Estimated: USD 500,000 – 700,000
USD 845,000

Results for “damien hirst zinc sulfide”

#28. Beautiful Tropical, Jungle Painting (with pink snot), 1998

Phillips London: 30 June 2022
Estimated: GBP 270,000 – 350,000
GBP 378,000 / USD 459,630

Damien Hirst 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

REPEAT SALE

Phillips London: 13 February 2020
Estimated: GBP 270,000 – 350,000
GBP 350,000 / USD 456,780

Damien Hirst 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

DAMIEN HIRST
Beautiful Tropical, Jungle Painting (with pink snot), 1998
Household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 84 3/8 inches (214.3 cm)
Signed, titled and dated
‘Damien Hirst Beautiful tropical, jungle painting (with pink snot) 1998’
on the reverse

#29. Centrophenoxine, 2015

Sotheby’s London: 3 March 2022
Estimated: GBP 250,000 – 350,000
GBP 327,600 / USD 436,392

Centrophenoxine | Modern & Contemporary Day Auction | 2022 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Centrophenoxine, 2015
Household gloss on canvas
57.2 x 51 inches (145 x 129.5 cm)
Signed on the stretcher; signed, titled and dated 2015 on the reverse

#30. Beautiful, red, edgy, ejaculating, pooh, comet, purple, spunk painting, 1997

Phillips New-York: 16 November 2022
Estimated: USD 300,000 – 500,000
USD 365,400

Damien Hirst – 20th Century & Cont… Lot 347 November 2022 | Phillips

#31. Beautiful, Bubblegum, Pizza, My Little Pony, Barbie Vomit Painting, 2013

Sotheby’s London: 15 October 2022
Estimated: GBP 250,000 – 350,000
GBP 252,000 / USD 281,721

Beautiful, Bubblegum, Pizza, My Little Pony, Barbie Vomit Painting | Contemporary Day Auction | 2022 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Beautiful, Bubblegum, Pizza, My Little Pony, Barbie Vomit Painting, 2013
Household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 84 inches (213.4 cm)
Signed on the stretcher; signed, titled and dated 2013 on the reverse

#32. Beautiful Magnificent Cantankerous Yet Generous Painting (with Diamonds), 2007

Sotheby’s New-York: 17 November 2022
Estimated: USD 300,000 – 400,000
USD 277,200

Beautiful Magnificent Cantankerous Yet Generous Painting (with Diamonds) | Contemporary Day Auction | 2022 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Beautiful Magnificent Cantankerous Yet Generous Painting (with Diamonds), 2007
Household gloss and cubic zirconia on canvas
Diameter: 84 inches (213.4 cm)
Signed Damien Hirst, titled and dated 2007 (on the reverse); signed Damien Hirst (on the stretcher)

#35. Melamine, 2002

Christie’s London: 2 March 2022
Estimated: GBP 50,000 – 70,000
GBP 119,700 / USD 160,005

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Melamine, 2002
Household gloss on canvas
18×14 inches (45.8 x 35.4 cm)
Signed, titled and dated (on the reverse)
Signed and stamped twice (on the stretcher)

#39. Naja Niricollis Pallida, 2000

Christie’s London: 14 October 2022
Estimated: GBP 120,000 – 180,000
GBP 100,800 / USD 113,004

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Naja Nigricollis Pallida, 2000
Household gloss on canvas
62.5 x 34.2 inches (158.6 x 86.7 cm)

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2021 Auction Results

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40 lots sold at auction in 2021 for a total turnover of USD 19,302,744. With only 2 lots failing to sell, the sell-through rate is 95%. The highest price of USD 3,450,000 for 2021 was achieved by The Warrior and the Bear sold at Christie’s in New-York on 11 May 2021.

2021 Top 3 Lots

5 lots sold for over USD 1 million. The Top 15 lots generated a cumulative turnover of USD 14,402,117, contributing 74.6% to the total turnover for 2021.

 

#1. The Warrior and the Bear, 2015

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2021
Estimated: USD 3,000,000 – 5,000,000
USD 3,450,000
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
The Warrior and the Bear, 2015
Bronze
280x102x80 inches (713x260x203 cm)
Engraved with the artist’s signature, number and date ‘D. Hirst 3/3 MMXV’
Stamped with the artist and foundry stamps (on the bear’s proper right foot)
This work is number three from an edition of three plus two artist’s proofs

#2. Veil of Hidden Meaning, 2017

Christie’s New-York: 9 November 2021
Estimated: USD 800,000 – 1,200,000
USD 1,470,000
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Veil of Hidden Meaning, 2017
Oil on canvas
120×96 inches (304.8 x 243.8 cm)
Signed, titled, inscribed and dated (on the reverse)

#3. Precious Moments, 2011-2012

Phillips London: 15 October 2021
Estimated: GBP 1,000,0000 – 1,500,000
GBP 990,500 / USD 1,362,635
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

Damien Hirst – 20th Century & Contem… Lot 25 October 2021 | Phillips

#4. Biotin-Propranolol Analog, 1995

Sotheby’s London: 29 June 2021
Estimated: GBP 650,000 – 850,000
GBP 837,000 / USD 1,158,798
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

Biotin-Propranolol Analog | British Art Evening Sale: Modern/Contemporary | 2021 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST  (B. 1965)
Biotin-Propranolol Analog, 1995
Household gloss on canvas
132×204 inches (335.3 x 518.2 cm)
Signed on the reverse

#5. N-(9-Acridinyl) Maleimide, 1992

Phillips London: 15 October 2021
Estimated: GBP 500,000 – 700,000
GBP 786,300 / USD 1,013,069
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

Damien Hirst – 20th Century & Contem… Lot 24 October 2021 | Phillips

DAMIEN HIRST
N-(9-Acridinyl) Maleimide, 1992
Household gloss on canvas
67 7/8 x 60 1/8 inches (172.6 x 152.6 cm)

#7. The Human Voice, 2006

Sotheby’s London: 25 March 2021
Estimated: GBP 600,000 – 800,000
GBP 620,000 / USD 850,596
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

The Human Voice | 《人聲》 | Modern Renaissance: A Cross-Category Sale | 2021 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
The Human Voice, 2006
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 84 inches (213.3 cm)a
Titled and dedicated For Jimmy I Love You! on the reverse
Signed, titled and dated 2006 on the stretcher

#8. The Incredible Journey, 2008

Sotheby’s London: 25 March 2021
Estimated: GBP 700,000 – 900,000
GBP 570,000 / USD 782,000
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

The Incredible Journey | 《奇妙旅程》 | Modern Renaissance: A Cross-Category Sale | 2021 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b.1965)
The Incredible Journey, 2008
Glass, painted stainless steel, silicone, monofilament, stainless steel, zebra and formaldehyde solutio
82 1/8 x 127 x 42 3/4 inches (208.6 x 322.5 x 108.8 cm)

#9. Penitent, 2011

Christie’s London: 23 March 2021
Estimated: GBP 350,000 – 450,000
GBP 437,500 / USD 603,448
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Penitent, 2011
Silver, paint
14 3/8 x 9 3/8 x 9 5/8 inches (36.5 x 23.9 x 24.6 cm)
Signed, numbered and dated ‘D. Hirst 3/3 MMXI’ (to the underside)
This work is number three from an edition of three plus two artist’s proofs

#10. Loperamide, 2005

Phillips New-York: 18 November 2021
Estimated: USD 400,000 – 600,000
USD 504,000
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

Damien Hirst – 20th Century & Cont… Lot 362 November 2021 | Phillips

#11. Beautiful Windmill of Hypnosis over Hippy Trippy Landscape painting, 2007

Sotheby’s New-York: 12 March 2021
Estimated: USD 350,000 – 450,000
USD 478,800
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

Beautiful Windmill of Hypnosis over Hippy Trippy Landscape painting | Contemporary Curated | 2021 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Beautiful Windmill of Hypnosis over Hippy Trippy Landscape painting, 2007
Household gloss on canvas
84×84 inches (213.4 x 213.4 cm)

#12. Beautiful career minded painting (with blue slash), 1997

Sotheby’s London: 29 June 2021
Estimated: GBP 250,000 -350,000
GBP 327,600 / USD 453,551

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Beautiful career minded painting (with blue slash), 1997
Household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 84 inches (213.4 cm)
Signed on the stretcher; signed, titled and dated 1997 on the reverse

#13. Arg-Ala, 1994

Sotheby’s London: 26 March 2021
Estimated: GBP 150,000 – 200,000
GBP 315,000 / USD 434,542

Arg-Ala | Contemporary Art Day Auction | 2021 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Arg-Ala, 1994
Household gloss on canvas
21 1/2 x 20 3/4 inches (54.5 x 52.5 cm)
Signed on the reverse

#14. Sinful, 2007

Sotheby’s London: 13 April 2021
Estimated: GBP 250,000 – 350,000
GBP 315,000 / USD 432,811

Sinful | Contemporary Curated | 2021 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Sinful, 2007
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
96×48 inches (243.8 x 121.9 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 2007 on the reverse

#16. Apomorphine, 1991

Sotheby’s London: 15 October 2021
Estimated: GBP 120,000 – 180,000
GBP 277,200 / USD 381,345

Apomorphine | Contemporary Art Day Auction | 2021 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Apomorphine, 1991
Household gloss on canvas
13×15 inches (34×38 cm)

#17. Beautiful You’re Hot but Weird How Children Make Life Worth Living in Technicolour Awe and Wonders Painting, 2017

Sotheby’s New-York: 30 September 2021
Estimated: USD 350,000 – 450,000
USD 378,000

Beautiful You’re Hot but Weird How Children Make Life Worth Living in Technicolour Awe and Wonders Painting | Contemporary Curated | 2021 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Beautiful You’re Hot but Weird How Children Make Life Worth Living in Technicolour Awe and Wonders Painting, 2017
Household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 60 inches (152 cm)
Signed on the stretcher; signed, titled and dated 2017 on the reverse

#18. Love to You, 2007

Sotheby’s London: 26 March 2021
Estimated: GBP 100,000 – 150,000
GBP 252,000 / USD 347,634

Love to You | Contemporary Art Day Auction | 2021 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Love to You, 2007
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 54 inches (137.2 cm)
Signed and titled on the stretcher

#19. Aurous Selenide, 2008

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 November 2021
Estimated: USD 180,000 – 250,000
USD 327,600

Aurous Selenide | Contemporary Day Auction | 2021 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Aurous Selenide, 2008
Household gloss and metallic paint on canvas
32.6 x 44.9 inches (83×114 cm)
Signed Damien Hirst, titled and dated 2008 (on the reverse)
Signed D Hirst (on the stretcher)

#21. Beautiful, Hurtling, Outward, Vortex, Skiddy, Shitty, Smear Painting, 1995

Sotheby’s London: 29 June 2021
Estimated: GBP 180,000 – 250,000
GBP 189,000 / USD 260,402

Beautiful, Hurtling, Outward, Vortex, Skiddy, Shitty, Smear Painting | Contemporary Art Day Auction | 2021 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Beautiful, Hurtling, Outward, Vortex, Skiddy, Shitty, Smear Painting, 1995
Household gloss on canvas
60×60 inches (152.4 x 152.4 cm)
Incised with the artist’s signature
Signed and dated 1995 on the stretcher

#22. Pemoline, 1995

Sotheby’s London: 1 July 2021
Estimated: GBP 150,000 – 200,000
GBP 189,000 / USD 260,402

Pemoline | Contemporary Art Day Auction | 2021 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Pemoline, 1995
Household gloss on canvas
27 1/2 x 55 5/8 inches (70.7 x 141.4 cm)
Signed on the stretcher; signed, titled and dated 1995 on the reverse

#25. Quo Vadis, 2005

Christie’s London: 2 July 2021
Estimated: GBP 250,000 – 200,000
GBP 150,000 / USD 206,925

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Quo Vadis, 2005
Glass, painted MDF, aluminum, metal pins, nickel-plated steel, sliding door lock and pharmaceutical packaging
24x36x6 inches (61 x 91.4 x 15.2 cm)
Signed, dedicated and dated ‘for Jasper Morrison Thanks for everything you did for me at the Pharmacy love Damien Hirst 2005/06’ (on the reverse)

#27. Dimethyl-Dichlorosilane, 2008-2011

Sotheby’s New-York: 13 May 2021
Estimated: USD 80,000 – 120,000
USD 201,600

Dimethyl-Dichlorosilane | Contemporary Art Day Auction | 2021 | Sotheby’s

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Dimethyl-Dichlorosilane, 2008-2011
Household gloss on canvas
17×19 inches (43.2 x 48.3 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 2008-2011 on the reverse
Signed on the stretcher

#28. Psalm 2: Quare fremuerunt gentes?, 2008

Christie’s London: 16 October 2021
Estimated: GBP 70,000 – 100,000
GBP 125,000 / USD 171,467

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Psalm 2: Quare fremuerunt gentes?, 2008
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 18 inches (45.7 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘2nd Psalm Damien Hirst 2008’ (on the reverse)

#37. Psalm 141: Domine, clamavi, 2008

Christie’s London: 16 October 2021
Estimated: GBP 70,000 – 100,000
GBP 68,750 / USD 93,307

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Psalm 141: Domine, clamavi, 2008
Butterflies, household gloss and chrome lacquer on canvas
Diameter: 18 inches (45.7 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Psalm 141 Damien Hirst 2008’ (on the reverse)

 

 

 

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Repeat Sales

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2025

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Avastin, 2005

Christie’s New-York: 30 September 2025
Estimated: USD 70,000 – 100,000
USD 76,200

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), Avastin | Christie’s

REPEAT SALE

Sotheby’s New-York: 11 May 2006
Estimated: USD 120,000 – 180,000
USD 168,000

Results for “damien hirst avastin”

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Avastin, 2005
Household gloss on canvas
15×13 inches (38.1 x 33 cm)

Oranges and Lemons, 2008

Christie’s London: 26 June 2025
Estimated: GBP 500,000 – 700,000
GBP 504,000 / USD 690,480

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), Oranges and Lemons | Christie’s

REPEAT SALE

Sotheby’s London: 15 September 2008
Estimated: GBP 500,000 – 700,000
GBP 589,250 / USD 1,053,660

Results for “damien hirst oranges and lemons”

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Oranges and Lemons, 2008
Butterflies, cubic zirconia and household gloss on canvas, in two parts
Each: 84×84 inches (213.4 x 213.4 cm)
Overall: 84×168 inches (213.4 x 426.8 cm)
Each: signed, titled, inscribed and dated ‘Damien Hirst 2008 “Oranges and Lemons”‘ (on the reverse)

Dimethyl-Dichlorosilane, 2008-2011

Phillips New-York: 14 May 2025
Estimated: USD 80,000 – 120,000
USD 165,100

Damien Hirst Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session

REPEAT SALE

Sotheby’s New-York: 13 May 2021
Estimated: USD 80,000 – 120,000
USD 201,600

Dimethyl-Dichlorosilane | Contemporary Art Day Auction | 2021 | Sotheby’s

Untitled (Birthday Card), 1999

Phillips London: 11 October 2024
Estimated: GBP 250,000 – 350,000
GBP 254,000 / USD 332,740

Damien Hirst – Modern & Contemporar… Lot 151 October 2024 | Phillips

REPEAT SALE

Christie’s New-York: 11 November 2004
Estimated: USD 200,000 – 300,000
USD 231,500

Damien Hirst (b.1965) , Untitled (Birthday Card) | Christie’s

Omnipotence, 2008

Phillips London: 10 October 2024
Estimated: GBP 350,000 – 450,000
GBP 444,500 / USD 582,595

Damien Hirst – Modern & Contemporary… Lot 33 October 2024 | Phillips

REPEAT SALE

Phillips London: 14 October 2022
Estimated: GBP 350,000 – 450,000
GBP 796,900 / USD 893,385

Damien Hirst 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

Love to You, 2007

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 6 October 2023
Estimated: HKD 1,200,000 – 1,800,000
HKD 1,651,000 / USD 210,812

Damien Hirst 達米恩 · 赫斯特 | Love to You 對你的愛 | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

REPEAT SALE

Sotheby’s London: 26 March 2021
Estimated: GBP 100,000 – 150,000
GBP 252,000 / USD 347,634

Love to You | Contemporary Art Day Auction | 2021 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Love to You, 2007
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 54 inches (137.2 cm)
Signed and titled on the stretcher

The Sleep of Reason, 1997-1998

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
The Sleep of Reason, 1997-1998
Glass, stainless steel, steel, nickel, brass, rubber and pharmaceutical packaging
Overall: 98 x 144 7/8 x 11 1/4 inches (249 x 368 x 28.6 cm)

Tricaprylin, 2007

Phillips London: 3 March 2023
Estimated: GBP 80,000 – 120,000
GBP 114,300 / USD 137,099

Damien Hirst – 20th Century & Contemp… Lot 240 March 2023 | Phillips

REPEAT SALE

Sotheby’s New-York: 24 September 2014
USD 100,000 – 150,000
USD 125,000 

(#219) Damien Hirst

Omniscience, 2007

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 27 April 2022
Estimated: HKD 5,000,000 – 7,000,000
HKD 4,410,000 / USD 562,012

Damien Hirst 達米恩・赫斯特 | Omniscience 全知 | Contemporary Evening Auction | 2022 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

REPEAT SALE

Sotheby’s London: 10 February 2016
Estimated: GBP 400,000 – 600,000
GBP 461,000 / USD 667,260

(#43) Damien Hirst

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Omniscience, 2007
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
102×102 inches (258.6 x 258.6 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 2007 on the reverse

Yes, but how do you really feel, 1996

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 27 April 2022
Estimated: HKD 6,000,000 – 8,000,000
HKD 7,560,000 / USD 963,450
READ MORE IN FOCUS SECTION

Damien Hirst 達米恩・赫斯特 | Yes, but how do you really feel 是的，但你的真實感受如何 | Contemporary Evening Auction | 2022 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

REPEAT SALE

Christie’s New-York: 15 November 2006
Estimated: USD 1,500,000 – 2,000,000
USD 1,472,000

Damien Hirst (B. 1965) , Yes, but how do you really feel | Christie’s

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Yes, but how do you really feel, 1996
Stainless steel, glass and six plastic skeletons
249x378x51 cm (98 x 138 7/8 x 20 1/8 inches)

Zinc Sulfide, 2004

Phillips London: 3 March 2022
Estimated: GBP 350,000 – 550,000
GBP 346,500 / USD 461,569

Damien Hirst – 20th Century & Contempo… Lot 38 March 2022 | Phillips

REPEAT SALE

Sotheby’s New-York: 15 May 2013
Estimated: USD 500,000 – 700,000
USD 845,000

Results for “damien hirst zinc sulfide”

Without You, 2008

Phillips London: 3 March 2022
Estimated: GBP 500,000 – 700,000
GBP 627,500 / USD 835,886

Damien Hirst 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

REPEAT SALE

Phillips London: 8 March 2018
Estimated: GBP 500,000 – 700,000
GBP 585,000 / USD 808,695

Damien Hirst 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

 

 

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Contribution Analysis

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WORK IN PROGRESS

 

The two major contributors to Damien Hirst’s auction market are the Butterfly Paintings, and the Pharmaceutical Paintings. They constitute together close to 62% of the 2023 auction turnover.

#1. Butterfly Paintings

17 Butterfly Paintings sold in 2023 for a total turnover of USD 8,931,091, representing 42.6% of the total turnover of 2023. The average price in 2023 is USD 526,496.

Year 2023	Year 2022	Year 2021
17 Lots	11 Lots	12 Lots
Turnover: USD 8,931,091	Turnover: USD 7,954,224	Turnover: USD 4,009,515
Top Lot: USD 1,810,679	Top Lot: USD 1,072,470	Top Lot: USD 983,043

 

#2. Spot/Pharmaceutical Paintings

15 Spot Paintings sold in 2023 for a total turnover of USD 4,401,749, contributing 19.8% to the total turnover for 2023.

 

Year 2023	Year 2022	Year 2021
15 Lots	16 Lots	10 Lots
Turnover: USD 4,401,749	Turnover: USD 6,062,752	Turnover: USD 4,616,629
Top Lot: USD 952,467	Top Lot: USD 1,260,000	Top Lot: USD 983,043

 

 

 

PART III: FOCUS

 

 

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Spot/Pharmaceutical Paintings

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Now spanning over a quarter of a century, Damien Hirst’s highly celebrated series of meticulously rendered Pharmaceutical Paintings have come to define the British artist’s prodigious output. Bridging the sense of order, primacy of the grid, and focus on scientific modes of categorization that we find in the Medicine Cabinets with the exuberant and joyful approach to color taken in his Spin Paintings. 

Compounding associations between his paintings and scientific endeavor, the title of works from this series are selected at random from the alphabetically arranged catalogue of drug company Sigma-Aldrich’s products that Hirst first stumbled across in the early 1990s.

 “I was always a colorist. I’ve always had a phenomenal love of color […] So that’s where the Spot paintings came from—to create that structure to do those colors, and do nothing.”

Sometimes likened to an array of different colored pills, visualized more directly in Hirst’s later cabinets, the first spots date from the very outset of Hirst’s career, painted directly onto the wall of the Surrey Docks Warehouse in the final phase of the now legendary Freeze exhibition curated by Hirst as an undergraduate student at Goldsmith’s in 1988. Just as in the innovative Medicine Cabinets which he first embarked on during the same year, Hirst found that he could generate infinitely variable results from the imposition of certain limitations in terms of the size and color of his forms, their arrangement in relation to one another, and the number of spots, pills, or boxes included in each work.

“Mathematically, with the spot paintings, I probably discovered the most fundamentally important thing in any kind of art. Which is the harmony of where color can exist on its own, interacting with other colors in a perfect format.”

Each Spot painting shares a certain set of properties: the spots are arranged on a grid made invisible by a white or off-white background; no two spots on a given work touch each other; and no hue is ever repeated on the same work. Hirst constructs each work mechanically, ensuring that the spots within a single painting are the same size and shape. The size of the gaps in the painting must also be equal to the diameter of the spots. Hirst notably uses household gloss to paint the spots, as its pure, sterile complexion recalls a medicinal workplace. The work’s repetitive nature at once suggests automated production and mesmerizes the viewer.

However, there is a certain problematization that comes to light in this series, namely inherent in the implied celebration of a heavily mediated and medicated postmodern society. Such a discourse has become increasingly magnified in recent years as evidenced by the ongoing opioid and pharmaceutical drug crises. That Hirst’s Pharmaceutical paintings would only increase in cultural relevance in the nearly three decades since their inception is a testament to their prescience. Ever in touch with allusions and theoretical discourse, Hirst rescues the age-old artistic genre of the grid from Modernist hands and returns it to its original roots in scientific thought and genetic structure.

The Spot paintings were originally conceived as an endless series of paintings in which the choice of size, variation of colour and number of spots on each painting were systematically infinite. Like a true scientist, Hirst expertly mixed hundreds of tones and shades of each colour in the spectrum in a controlled experiment. Organized only by the structure of the circular coloured discs evenly spaced on the white background in a grid-like formation, Hirst worked through his experimentations with colour and scale in a highly logical manner. His canvases range from Iodomethane- 13c (1999-2000), a 40-foot canvas containing 1-inch spots, to L-Isoleucinol (2008-2011), which measures 10 by 16 inches and contains 25,781 one-millimeter spots. No one colour seems to be privileged over another, and thus no hierarchy is implied. This even-handedness, where colour relationships are coolly, carefully balanced, puts forward a draughtsman-like rigor to the canvas. Marking a watershed moment in the critical recognition of the Spot Paintings, in 2012 Gagosian mounted a major solo exhibition The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011 across its galleries globally, the same year that Tate Modern presented his first significant museum retrospective.

 

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Damien Hirst Spot/Pharmaceutical Paintings

 

 

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Butterfly Paintings

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Damien Hirst Butterfly Paintings

 

 

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Spin Paintings

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Hirst made his very first Spin Paintings in 1992 in his studio in Brixton, London, titling the works with the amusingly convoluted titles that were to become the hallmark of the series. One year after the series’ inception, Hirst set up a spin painting stall with fellow artist Angus Fairhurst at a street art fair ‘A Fete Worse than Death’. Made-up as clowns by performance artist Leigh Bowery, Fairhurst and Hirst invited visitors to pay £1 to create their own spin paintings to be signed by the pair.

When Hirst started the series in earnest in 1994 on circular shaped canvases, they became one of the most instantly recognizable and popular parts of his entire corpus. Influenced by the postmodern privileging of chance and the aleatory, Hirst exerts a limited amount of control in the creation of these works. By pouring a succession of different hues of household emulsion paint onto a rapidly rotating canvas, Hirst creates variegated surfaces of gravity-informed color that bespeak the centrifugal energy of their execution. Emptied over the canvas in a manner akin to Jackson Pollock, Hirst’s application of paint combined with the mechanical spin of the surface is undeniably performative in its vigor.

After the initial success, Hirst scaled up the machine that spun the canvases and began to make paintings like the present work. The process in which Hirst throws the colors randomly onto the moving canvas involves a paradoxical balance between regimented machinery and total chance. He cannot know how the work will precisely turn out, instead trusting the colors to fuse and mix in a celebration of change. Visually recalling a spinning record on a turntable, the works have a conceptual lineage in Dadaist Marcel Duchamp’s kinetic collaborations, notably the optical effects that he generated with sculptural objects. However, while Duchamp’s focus on the mechanized and the optical attempted to remove the hand of the artist altogether, Hirst’s Spin Paintings retain a sense of vitality and individuality through the careful selection of paints and his direct application of them, recalling the performative and energetic application of Jackson Pollock’s poured canvases and the centrifugal force of his later works.

The lengthy and evocative titles of these works typically contain a staccato of rhythmical adjectives that mirror their chaotic facture and resultant compositions. Extolling an unbridled celebration of color and movement, the Spin Paintings offer a chromatic symphony that is at once harmonious and in disarray.

Beautiful, Dental, Brushing, Full Mouth Rehabilitation, Mullish, Thank You Painting, circa 1995

Bonhams London: 5 March 2026
Estimated: GBP 120,000 – 180,000
GBP 140,100 / USD 246,540

Bonhams : DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) Beautiful, Dental, Brushing, Full Mouth Rehabilitation, Mullish, Thank You Painting (Painted circa 1995)

 

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Beautiful, Dental, Brushing, Full Mouth Rehabilitation, Mullish, Thank You Painting, circa 1995
Household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 48 inches (121.9 cm)

Executed circa 1995, Beautiful, Dental, Brushing, Full Mouth Rehabilitation, Thank You Painting is an early and luminous example of Damien Hirst’s iconic series of Spin paintings. Hirst initiated this body of work in 1992, experimenting with the centrifugal force of a rapidly rotating circular canvas onto which he poured vivid streams of household paint. These celebrated Spin paintings captivate through their vibrant kineticism, generated by the spontaneous operations of chance, as the artist’s own hand is nearly removed from the final composition. The methodology of the present work recalls Jackson Pollock’s revolutionary drip paintings, through which Pollock pioneered a technique of dynamically dripping and pouring skeins of paint onto canvas or paper spread upon the floor beneath him. Similarly animated and bursting with chromatic intensity that seems to extend beyond the canvas’s perimeter, Hirst’s Spin paintings engage the uncertainty inherent in human experience, emblematic of the artist’s enduring pursuit to transcend predetermined limits within his own artistic practice.

Shaped by postmodernism’s privileging of chance and the aleatory, Hirst’s Spin paintings stand in marked contrast to his methodical Spot series, though both interrogate the notion of an imagined mechanical artist, which is a conceit Hirst has provocatively sustained throughout his diverse oeuvre. Beautiful, Dental, Brushing, Full Mouth Rehabilitation, Thank You Painting unites the automatic with the tactile, creating organic, unique painterly gestures through a regulated process. The tension between automation and chance lies at the heart of Hirst’s practice, through which he seeks to unsettle convention and extend the formal and conceptual boundaries of painting, while reaffirming his enduring engagement with mortality, where chance and control remain inextricably entwined.

As with much of Hirst’s oeuvre, the apparent simplicity of the spin painting technique is inseparable from his fundamental interrogation of art’s function and value. The artist has recounted that the series was inspired by childhood memories of watching Blue Peter presenter John Noakes demonstrate a variant of the process using a motorised cardboard spinning device. Some time after viewing the broadcast, Hirst attended a school event where he first attempted spin painting himself, recalling a sustained fascination and near-obsessive compulsion to repeat the act again and again. Ironically, Hirst later inaugurated his own spin painting enterprise within a comparable milieu: after producing several early works in his Brixton studio in 1992, he established, the following year, a spin art stall with fellow artist Angus Fairhurst at Joshua Compston’s street fair A Fête Worse than Death. For the occasion, the performance artist Leigh Bowery famously transformed Hirst and Fairhurst into clowns, and visitors were invited to produce their own spin paintings, which the artists signed upon completion.

In 1994, whilst living in Berlin, Hirst commissioned the fabrication of his own spin machine, a development that marked the moment at which the series began to take shape. Created circa 1995, the present work encapsulates the euphoric ecstasy of these early investigations. As the Spin paintings became increasingly popular, Hirst never lost his childlike sense of wonder in the process that had inspired him as a young boy.

“I really like making them. And I really like the machine, and I really like the movement. Every time they’re finished, I’m desperate to do another one.”

Ultimately, these works function as unrestrained affirmations of the power of painting: by removing his own hand directly from the process, Hirst reawakens a primal sense of awe in its unpredictable possibilities. Hypnotic in composition and resplendent in chromatic brilliance, Beautiful, Dental, Brushing, Full Mouth Rehabilitation, Thank You Painting is an exquisitely executed work that provides a kaleidoscopic and meditative experience for the viewer.

 

Beautiful Scary Clown in a Rockabilly Town Painting, 2006

Christie’s London: 7 March 2026
Estimated: GBP 200,000 – 300,000
GBP 298,450 / USD 398,700

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), Beautiful Scary Clown in a Rockabilly Town Painting | Christie’s

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Beautiful Scary Clown in a Rockabilly Town Painting, 2006
Household gloss on canvas
95-1/4 x 107-1/2 inches (242×273 cm)
Stamped with artist’s stamp ‘HIRST’ (on the reverse and stretcher)

Damien Hirst’s Beautiful Scary Clown in a Rockabilly Town Painting is a kaleidoscopic burst of colour. Astral rings of red, yellow, green, and dark blue give way to one another across the mammoth canvas as streaks of metallic gold erupt from the centre and flicker outward in spontaneous flares. Executed in 2006, the work is part of the artist’s Spin Painting series, which he began making more than a decade prior. To create them, Hirst affixed a canvas to a rotating motor and then poured pigments onto the whirling white expanse. This motion, its effects captured in centrifugal explosions of color, was central to the final painting.

“The movement sort of implies life.” 

Jackson Pollock, Number 22, 1949. Private collection. Artwork: © 2026 Jackson Pollock, DACS.

Hirst’s inspiration for the Spin Paintings emerged from memories of seeing the technique demonstrated during an episode of the children’s programme Blue Peter. His fascination piqued, he later attempted the method himself at a school fête.

“I queued up all day and I was making them over and over again.”

He produced several examples in his Brixton studio in 1992. The following year, Hirst and the artist Angus Fairhurst organised their own spin stall at Joshua Compston’s legendary street fair A Fête Worse than Death in London’s Hoxton neighbourhood. Visitors were invited to pay 50p to create their own unique spin paintings, which the artists, dressed as clowns, would sign. The present work’s title, Beautiful Scary Clown in a Rockabilly Town Painting, seems to hark back to this event and its carnivalesque costumes.

Angus Fairhurst and Damien Hirst at the original A Fête Worse Than Death, Hoxton, London, 1993. Photo: © Guy Moberly via Alamy.

As expressions of chance and vitality, the Spin Paintings represent a departure from the themes of decay and death that had characterized Hirst’s earlier work. They are optimistic visions that revel in the act of painting and all its attendant mythology, and for the artist they conjure the same sense of wonder he experienced as a child.

“I really like making them. And I really like the machine, and I really like the movement. Every time they’re finished, I’m desperate to do another one.”

At the same time, the series reflects Hirst’s emerging interest in automated processes—and the relationship between order and chaos—which has continued to inform his practice. Above all, works such as Beautiful Scary Clown in a Rockabilly Town Painting celebrate the power of paint, and by removing his own hand from the act, Hirst takes great pleasure in the medium’s unpredictable and manifold possibilities.

Beautiful, Eye-Opening, Hallucination of Breathtaking Spectacular Trip Gift Painting for John, 2016

Sotheby’s London: 13 October 2023
Estimated: GBP 120,000 – 180,000
GBP 165,100 / USD 200,364

Beautiful, Eye-Opening, Hallucination of Breathtaking Spectacular Trip Gift Painting for John | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Beautiful, Eye-Opening, Hallucination of Breathtaking Spectacular Trip Gift Painting for John, 2016
Household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 72 inches (183 cm)
Signed (on the stretcher)
Signed, titled, dated 2016 and variously inscribed (on the reverse)

Executed in 2016, Beautiful Eye-Opening Hallucination of Breathtaking Spectacular Trip Gift Painting for John belongs to Damien Hirst’s iconic Spin Painting series. Created by pouring different colors of household paint onto a rapidly rotating canvas, Hirst’s renowned Spin Paintings are visually arresting for their colorful kineticism achieved through the spontaneous effects of chance, as the artist’s own hand is removed from the final product. Hirst’s approach recalls Jackson Pollock’s revolutionary drip paintings, which forever altered the trajectory of art in the 20th century through Pollock’s pioneering technique involving dynamic dripping and pouring skeins of paint on canvas or paper laid on the floor below him. Equally filled with dynamism and a cacophony of color, well beyond the limits of the canvas, Hirst’s Spin Paintings draw from the uncertainty intrinsic to the human experience and symbolize the artist’s ongoing quest to push beyond preordained limits.

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Beautiful Pete Townshend Tune after Tune Painting, 2022
Household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 48 inches (121.9 cm)
Signed on the stretcher; signed, titled and dated 2022 on the reverse

Beautiful Pete Townshend Tune after Tune Painting was created for the debut of Pete Townshend’s new single Can’t Outrun The Truth. The first solo single from the founder of The Who in 29 years, the song was co-written and produced by Rachel Fuller. Rachel and Pete reached out to Damien Hirst to create an artwork for the track, resulting in a unique one-off spin painting of Townshend, which adorns the sleeve of the 200 individual single vinyl records. Each of these were signed by Townshend and made exclusively available during the Teenage Cancer Trust Gigs at the Royal Albert Hall earlier this year. All proceeds from the sale of the vinyl, as well as a percentage of each digital download, went to the Teenage Cancer Trust UK.

PETE TOWNSHEND WITH THE CAN’T OUTRUN THE TRUTH VINYL. / IMAGE: © PETE TOWNSHEND

Beautiful Pete Townshend Tune after Tune Painting is a wonderful example from Hirst’s iconic Spin Paintings series. Created by pouring different colors of household paint onto a rapidly rotating canvas, Hirst’s renowned Spin Paintings are visually arresting for their colorful kineticism achieved through the spontaneous effects of chance, as the artist’s own hand is removed from the final product. By pouring a succession of different hues of household emulsion paint, the artist creates variegated surfaces of color that speak to the centrifugal energy of their execution. Filled with dynamism and exploding with colour well beyond the limits of the canvas, Hirst’s Spin Paintings symbolize the beautiful unpredictability of life and the artist’s ongoing quest to push beyond preordained limits. The artist created his very first Spin Paintings in 1992 in his studio in Brixton, titling the works with the amusingly convoluted titles which now distinguish the series.

Beautiful, red, edgy, ejaculating, pooh, comet, purple, spunk painting, 1997

Phillips New-York: 16 November 2022
Estimated: USD 300,000 – 500,000
USD 365,400

Damien Hirst – 20th Century & Cont… Lot 347 November 2022 | Phillips

Beautiful, red, edgy, ejaculating, pooh, comet, purple, spunk painting, executed in 1997, forms part of Damien Hirst’s iconic Spin Paintings series. Colors splash and twirl outwards from the center, exploding in all directions across the tondo. Like a giant, multi-colored eye, the work mesmerizes, pulling the viewer deeper and deeper into its spiral. Hirst’s intense interest in visual experience, fascination with death and time, and playful openness to chance are all exemplified in the present work.

Beautiful, Bubblegum, Pizza, My Little Pony, Barbie Vomit Painting, 2013

Sotheby’s London: 15 October 2022
Estimated: GBP 250,000 – 350,000
GBP 252,000 / USD 281,721

Beautiful, Bubblegum, Pizza, My Little Pony, Barbie Vomit Painting | Contemporary Day Auction | 2022 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Beautiful, Bubblegum, Pizza, My Little Pony, Barbie Vomit Painting, 2013
Household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 84 inches (213.4 cm)
Signed on the stretcher; signed, titled and dated 2013 on the reverse

Damien Hirst’s Beautiful, Bubblegum, Pizza, My Little Pony, Barbie Vomit Painting from 2013 is an exceptional example from the artist’s iconic Spin Painting series. Created by pouring different colors of household paint onto a rapidly rotating canvas, Hirst’s renowned Spin Paintings are visually arresting for their colorful kineticism achieved through the spontaneous effects of chance, as the artist’s own hand is removed from the final product. Hirst’s approach reminds of Jackson Pollock’s revolutionary drip paintings, which forever altered the trajectory of art in the 20th century through Pollock’s pioneering technique involving dynamic dripping and pouring skeins of paint on canvas or paper laid on the floor below him. Equally filled with dynamism and exploding with color, well beyond the limits of the canvas, Hirst’s Spin Paintings draw from the uncertainty intrinsic to the human experience and symbolize the artist’s ongoing quest to push beyond preordained limits.

Beautiful You’re Hot but Weird How Children Make Life Worth Living in Technicolour Awe and Wonders Painting, 2017

Sotheby’s New-York: 30 September 2021
Estimated: USD 350,000 – 450,000
USD 378,000

Beautiful You’re Hot but Weird How Children Make Life Worth Living in Technicolour Awe and Wonders Painting | Contemporary Curated | 2021 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Beautiful You’re Hot but Weird How Children Make Life Worth Living in Technicolour Awe and Wonders Painting, 2017
Household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 60 inches (152 cm)
Signed on the stretcher; signed, titled and dated 2017 on the reverse

Damien Hirst’s Beautiful You’re Hot but Weird How Children Make Life Worth Living… from 2017 is a kaleidoscopic example from the artist’s iconic Spin Paintings series, which he creates by pouring different colors of household paint onto a rapidly rotating circular canvas. Hirst’s renowned Spin Paintings are visually arresting for their colorful kineticism achieved through the spontaneous effects of chance, as the artist’s own hand is nearly removed from the final product. The artist’s approach to the present work is much like Jackson Pollock’s revolutionary drip paintings—forever altered the trajectory of painting in the 20th century—in which Pollock pioneered his drip technique by dynamically dripping and pouring skeins of paint on canvas or paper laid on the floor below him. Equally filled with dynamism and exploding with color well beyond the limits of the canvas, Hirst’s Spin Paintings draw from the uncertainty intrinsic to the human experience and symbolize the artist’s ongoing quest to push beyond preordained limits when it comes to his own artistic boundaries.

Beautiful, Hurtling, Outward, Vortex, Skiddy, Shitty, Smear Painting, 1995

Sotheby’s London: 29 June 2021
Estimated: GBP 180,000 – 250,000
GBP 189,000 / USD 260,402

Beautiful, Hurtling, Outward, Vortex, Skiddy, Shitty, Smear Painting | Contemporary Art Day Auction | 2021 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Beautiful, Hurtling, Outward, Vortex, Skiddy, Shitty, Smear Painting, 1995
Household gloss on canvas
60×60 inches (152.4 x 152.4 cm)
Incised with the artist’s signature
Signed and dated 1995 on the stretcher

A cacophony of riotous color, Beautiful, Hurtling, Outward, Vortex, Skiddy, Shitty, Smear Painting is an arresting and early example from Damien Hirst’s iconic series of Spin Paintings. Bursting with a dynamic vitality, a spinning vortex pulsates outward offering visions of vigorous movement and unruly color. Exuding a heady effervescence of psychedelic effect, an explosion of colour ignites from the epicentre of a circular shaped canvas. Meanwhile, as though accelerated by osmosis, outpourings of red, orange, pink and yellow dominate the composition. Polychromatic streaks of blue and emerald green punctuate an otherwise chaotic arrangement, espousing a wholly complete and homogenous painterly surface. Created in 1995 as an early iteration of this iconic series, the present work brilliantly encapsulates Hirst’s tongue-in-cheek attitude to art historical tradition through its method of production: standing from above and pouring household emulsion paint onto a rapidly rotating canvas, Hirst would engender vibrant expressions of liberation, chance, and spontaneity.

Beautiful, Hurtling, Outward, Vortex, Skiddy, Shitty, Smear Painting is a consummate example, epitomizing Hirst’s metaphor that the spinning vortex of paint resembles the chaotic unpredictability of existence.

Beautiful career minded painting (with blue slash), 1997

Sotheby’s London: 29 June 2021
Estimated: GBP 250,000 -350,000
GBP 327,600 / USD 453,551

Beautiful career minded painting (with blue slash) | British Art Evening Sale: Modern/Contemporary | 2021 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Beautiful career minded painting (with blue slash), 1997
Household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 84 inches (213.4 cm)
Signed on the stretcher; signed, titled and dated 1997 on the reverse

A cacophony of riotous color, Beautiful Career Minded Painting (with Blue Slash) is an arresting example from Damien Hirst’s iconic series of Spin Paintings. Bursting with a dynamic vitality, a spinning vortex pulsates outward offering visions of vigorous movement and unruly color. Exuding a heady effervescence of psychedelic effect, an explosion of color ignites from the epicenter of a circular shaped canvas. Meanwhile, as though accelerated by osmosis, outpourings of crimson and luminous yellow dominate the composition. Polychromatic streaks of playful azure and lime green punctuate an otherwise chaotic arrangement, espousing a wholly complete and homogenous painterly surface.

Beautiful Windmill of Hypnosis over Hippy Trippy Landscape painting, 2007

Sotheby’s New-York: 12 March 2021
Estimated: USD 350,000 – 450,000
USD 478,800

Beautiful Windmill of Hypnosis over Hippy Trippy Landscape painting | Contemporary Curated | 2021 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Beautiful Windmill of Hypnosis over Hippy Trippy Landscape painting, 2007
Household gloss on canvas
84×84 inches (213.4 x 213.4 cm)

A cacophony of riotous color, Beautiful Windmill of Hypnosis over Hippy Trippy Landscape, is an arresting example from Damien Hirst’s iconic series of Spin Paintings. Bursting with a dynamic vitality, a spinning vortex pulsates outward offering visions of vigorous movement and unruly color. Exuding a heady effervescence of psychedelic effect, an explosion of color ignites from the epicenter of a circular shaped canvas. Meanwhile, as though accelerated by osmosis, outpourings of red and blue dominate the composition. Polychromatic streaks of playful orange and pronounced yellow punctuate an otherwise chaotic arrangement, espousing a wholly complete and homogeneous painterly surface. Created in 2007, the present work brilliantly encapsulates Hirst’s tongue-in-cheek attitude to art historical tradition through its method of production: standing from above and pouring household emulsion paint onto a rapidly rotating canvas, Hirst would engender vibrant expressions of liberation, chance, and spontaneity.

 

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Veil Paintings

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“I believe all painting and art should be uplifting for the viewer. I love color. I feel it inside me. It gives me a buzz.” 

Marking a pivotal shift in his working methods, and indeed his approach to series more broadly, Hirst painted his Veil works alone, working on several canvases at once. Immersing himself totally in chromatic splendor, the works continue the artist’s career-long interest in the pleasurable optic effects of color, as can be traced through his seminal ‘Spot Paintings’ to his later ‘Spin Paintings’.

Veil of Life Everlasting, 2017

Christie’s New-York: 14 May 2025
Estimated: USD 1,500,000 – 2,000,000
USD 2,228,000

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), Veil of Life Everlasting | Christie’s

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Veil of Life Everlasting, 2017
Oil on canvas
Installation orientation variable
108×144 inches (274.3 x 365.8 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Damien Hirst Veil of Life Everlasting 2017’ (on the reverse)

Spanning over nine feet in height and almost twelve feet in width, Damien Hirst’s Veil of Life Everlasting is a monumental, prismatic canvas from the artist’s celebrated series of Veils. Executed between 2017 and 2019, the paintings which comprise the Veils, and an accompanying series of works on paper, were the first of several recent series by the artist—who typically relies on a team of assistants to support his prodigious artistic output—to be painted entirely by Hirst’s hand. The Veils present an evolution of the artist’s career-long exploration of chromatics, seriality, and human mortality. They recall the Visual Candy paintings of the early 1990s, which had paid homage to Hirst’s embattled draw towards artists like Willem de Kooning and Chaïm Soutine.

“My heart felt like I was into ’50s gestural painting at the time, and my head was in Minimalism and the consumer world.”

For many years the latter took precedence, exemplified in the Spot Paintings’ rigid, obsessive arrangements of random color, which had endeavored to bring order into the chaos of human existence. The Veils, which are allowed to be hung in any orientation, are inspired by Georges Seurat’s pointillist canvases and the Impressionist paintings of Claude Monet They constitute a triumphant surrender to the unfettered joy of gesture.

In Veil of Life Everlasting a confetti-like eruption of paint cascades across the surface of the work, in the series’ signature palette of magenta and carmine, verdant green, cobalt violet, assorted blues—Prussian, cerulean and ultramarine—as well as cadmium orange and red, and Naples yellow. Atop layers of color which vie and yield to one another to forge an undulating, immersive pictorial field, verdant green impasto daubs are scattered abundantly across large portions of the work’s surface. Beneath, hues of pink and orange collide with deep flashes of blue. Despite the allover effect, evocative of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, there is remarkable variety in the scale and density of each daub; some are tiny, precisely placed flecks, while others—thick and encrusted—bare the echo of a heavily laden brush. In places, excess paint falls in delicate trails across the canvas. The effect is evocative of a hazy sunset scene glimpsed through gently billowing foliage, as an intense, rosy light refracts on water and scatters into bright white flashes.

Claude Monet, The Water-Lily Pond, 1899. National Gallery, London.

The Veils were envisioned as a limited series from their point of conception, and they respond to and inform one another. Working across many canvases simultaneously in his vast, bright London studio, Hirst would prime each in one block of color before building up layer upon layer of paint. He moved freely around the studio carrying a hand-mixed tin of paint, scattering tiny flecks across the surface of each canvas.

“I have a selection of colors I love and use over and over again. They are like sweet shop colors and the colors of fruit and flowers; they are my go-to colors.” 

For the series, Hirst used a longer-than-normal bristle brush, about two and a half feet long. The physical space this enforced between artist and artwork allowed Hirst to maintain distance and perspective, as the mystical process of optical mixing transpired on the canvas in front of him.

Gustav Klimt, Roses Under the Trees, circa 1905. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

The allusion to immortality in the title of the present work speaks to Hirst’s extraordinary and life-long obsession with death. The theme of mortality haunts the artist’s wider oeuvre and is felt keenly in the Veils, despite their chromatic vivacity. The canvas contains a vastitude; the sublime is revealed within paint.

“They are a battle with the idea of death. The infinite series I made at the beginning of my career was a way for me to not face that. It’s a great way to imagine that you will last forever—even though you won’t … maybe in my Spot paintings I was hiding from my own mortality.” 

In this way, the Veils become a metaphor for life itself—which blooms with ephemeral splendor. In one sense Veil of Life Everlasting captures Hirst’s acceptance of death, his ultimate inability to broach the threshold between mortal and immortal life. Yet it simultaneously gestures towards another kind of immortality, embedded deep within the recesses of painting itself.

Veil of Serendipity, 2017

Christie’s London: 7 March 2024
Estimated: GBP 650,000 – 850,000
GBP 819,000 / USD 1,038,492

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), Veil of Serendipity | Christie’s (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Veil of Serendipity, 2017
Oil on canvas
66×45 inches (167.8 x 114.3 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Damien Hirst Veil of Serendipity 2017’ (on the reverse)

A kaleidoscopic symphony of color, Veil of Serendipity is a dazzling work from Damien Hirst’s celebrated series of Veils. Warm shades of yellow, pink, crimson and orange collide with dappled greens and blues, speckled with brilliant flashes of white. The painting sparkles with optical magic, its impasto textures shifting in and out of focus as the canvas catches the light. Completed in 2017, just before Hirst’s major exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, the Veils represent joyful odes to the power of paint. Extending the language of his seminal Spot Paintings, as well as the Colour Space works of 2016, they were directly inspired by the Visual Candy paintings that Hirst created in New York in the 1990s. Shot through with the influence of Post-Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism and Op Art, they continue the exploration of gesture and colour that had fuelled this early series. Here, Hirst dispenses with the subversive conceptual language that underpins so much of his art, submitting instead to the sensory pleasures of brush and canvas.

Hirst’s Visual Candy paintings, defined by their tessellating patches of bright colour, had paid homage to his love of the New York School. During this intensely creative period—the heyday of the Young British Artists—he had felt conflicted by his affinity with painters such as Willem de Kooning. Much of his oeuvre at the time had its roots in Minimalism; dark, witty and ironic, his art confronted grandiose themes of life, death and faith. Wary of taking the plunge into pure gestural abstraction, Hirst instead channelled his love of colour into the Spot Paintings, whose obsessive grids of perfect yet randomly-coloured dots sought to capture the chaos of human existence. In 2016, the Colour Space paintings began to introduce a greater sense of painterly expression, embracing chance and error through the inclusion of drips and smears. In the Veil paintings, begun the following year, Hirst would finally pick up where he had left off over two decades prior, embracing the wonders of paint on a grand and unapologetic scale.

Using a long-bristled brush to dab, flick and spatter the canvas, Hirst relinquished both structure and concept. Instead, he explained, these works were ‘about now, about something energetic forming, like planets or ideas, they are about growth. I want them to feel like you’re looking through a sheer curtain at something patterned in a colourful, complicated garden beyond … I want you to get lost in them I want you to fall into them and I want them to delight your eyes’ (D. Hirst, Instagram, 28 February 2018).

Paul Signac, Le Pin de Bertaud at Saint-Tropez, 1909. Pushkin Museum, Moscow. Photo: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Scala, Florence.

Hirst delved deep into art history, reigniting his passion not only for Abstract Expressionism, but also for the works of Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard and Georges Seurat. He looked at Goya’s mark-making and the paintings of Chaïm Soutine; he was ‘never that far away’, he professed, from ‘Op painters like Larry Poons or Bridget Riley, and Yayoi Kusama’. The results, he explained, ‘felt totally new and right’ (D. Hirst, quoted in A. McDonald, ‘In the Studio: Damien Hirst’s Veil Paintings’, Gagosian Quarterly, 4 July 2020). Veil of Serendipity sparkles with pure and uninhibited celebration: Hirst had, in many ways, finally returned home.

Veil of Imagination, 2017

Christie’s New-York: 7 November 2023
Estimated: USD 1,000,000 – 1,500,000
USD 1,260,000

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Veil of Imagination, 2017
Oil on canvas
72×48 inches (182.9 x 121.9 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Damien Hirst 2017 ‘Veil of Imagination” (on the reverse)
Signed again ‘D. Hirst’ (on the stretcher)

Stretching six feet in height, Damien Hirst’s Veil of Imagination is a cascade of jubilant Technicolor. Across the expansive canvas, lilac, yellow, pale blue, and bubble-gum pink spots explode and flutter like confetti. The work is one of the artist’s Veil paintings. Conceived as a finite series each layered with dots, daubs and dollops of brightly-colored impasto.

Indeed, Hirst pays homage to the iconic and unmistakable language of his spots in the present work. Describing the Veils, the artist revealed: “I have a selection of colors I love and use over and over again. They are like sweet shop colors and the colors of fruit and flowers” (D. Hirst interviewed by A. McDonald, “In The Studio: Damien Hirst’s Veil Paintings,” Gagosian Quarterly, July 4, 2020). Where his earlier works featured meticulously rendered, flat and almost machine-made spots, however, Veil of Imagination presents a rich field of texture. It flickers with live and unbridled potential. Starting by priming each canvas with a different color, Hirst went on to use a long bristle brush—around two to two-and-a-half feet long—to apply thick impasto stipples of pigment. Establishing crucial physical distance from his painterly surface, this technique meant he could perceive the dense tessellation of individual daubs as a coalescent whole, in which flecks of bright color meld and effervesce.

Damien Hirst in his studio, London, 2017. © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved / DACS, London / ARS, NY 2023.

Hirst’s technique pays homage to the radical stylistic developments of late-nineteenth century Impressionism and post-Impressionism. Veil of Imagination feels like it could be a magnified sample of Seurat’s Pointillist landscapes, Bonnard’s interiors blooming with brilliant floral arrangements or Monet’s water garden at Giverny, speckled with pale flowers. Hirst himself has compared the effect of his Veil works to Monet’s dappled waterlily ponds. Just as the water’s surface had constituted a visually spectacular, reflective boundary worthy of representation upon the picture plane, Hirst considered his canvas itself as a “veil”, a fine film separating one realm from another. “I wanted to make paintings that were a celebration”, he says, “that revealed something and obscured something at the same time” (D. Hirst interviewed by A. McDonald, ibid.). Here, beneath a mesmeric surface of vibrating, fleeting color, he promises a world of imagination, fantasy, and delight.

Claude Monet, The Artist’s Garden at Giverny, 1900. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo: © Musee d’Orsay, Paris, / Giraudon / Bridgeman Images.

The Veil paintings mark a pivotal move away from the artist’s longstanding allegiance to hard-edged Minimalism—seen in his organization of form, painted or three-dimensional, within gridded, cubic structures like vitrines and cabinets and pharmaceutical packaging—towards a looser, gestural abstraction. Releasing form and color upon large-scale canvases, Hirst cultivates a sensorily immersive experience evocative of the “all-over” approach of Abstract Expressionism. His embrace of gestural mark-making and his fascination with the interactive, emotive effects of pure color denote the legacy of the New York School, which included such legendary painters as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. “I’ve always liked paintings that are exciting to the eye”, Hirst has said. “I suppose dots come out of that. It’s a surface that moves” (D. Hirst, quoted in D. Vankin, “Why Damien Hirst is seeing dots in his new work on view in Beverley Hills”, Los Angeles Times, March 23, 2018).

The artist has reflected on his attraction to series as a defining mode of his artistic expression. He relates them to the dialectic underpinning his practice, that of permanence and impermanence; mortality and immortality. “They are a battle with the idea of death”, he says. “The infinite series I made at the beginning of my career was a way for me to not face that. It’s a great way to imagine that you will last forever—even though you won’t. Now that I’m older the series are getting smaller, and that feels more realistic” (D. Hirst interviewed by A. McDonald, ibid.). Part of an intimate and purposeful series, the present work stands as a rare expression of unbounded joy in Hirst’s oeuvre, celebratory in the face of its own finitude.

Veil of Mother’s Tenderness, 2017

Christie’s New-York: 17 November 2022
Estimated: USD 1,000,000 – 1,500,000
USD 1,980,000

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Veil of Mother’s Tenderness, 2017
Oil on canvas
108×72 inches (274.3 x 189.2 cm)
Signed, titled and dated (on the reverse)

Rainbow confetti explodes across Damien Hirst’s Veil of Mother’s Tenderness, enveloping the viewer in an exuberant burst of pure, euphoric color. Teeming with rose pinks, verdant greens, sky blues, and blazing orange, the painting conjures images of Gustave Klimt’s fields of flowers. The work forms part of Hirst’s Veils, a series he began in 2008 after the death of his friend, the artist, Angus Fairhurst. Created on a monumental scale, Veil of Mother’s Tenderness pays playful tribute to neo-Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism’s ‘all over’ approach as well Hirst’s own prolific practice. Indeed, in some ways, these paintings encapsulate Hirst’s long, and ongoing, exploration of color. Executed in 2017, Veil of Mother’s Tenderness is a firework display of luscious color and bold brushwork.

Veil of Hidden Meaning, 2017

Christie’s New-York: 9 November 2021
Estimated: USD 800,000 – 1,200,000
USD 1,470,000

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Veil of Hidden Meaning, 2017
Oil on canvas
120×96 inches (304.8 x 243.8 cm)
Signed, titled, inscribed and dated (on the reverse)

Veil of Hidden Meaning is a particularly luscious example from the artist’s Veil Paintings series that he started in the late 2010s. Stemming from his earlier work with brightly colored compositions in various forms, this body of work is particularly beholden to the legacy of late nineteenth-century artists and the work of Op artists like Larry Poons and Yayoi Kusama. The artist often works in discrete series as a way of creating constraints for his creative output, noting “I like series because they define you. I have so many conflicting ideas, and a series is great way to jump in and out of something. Also, they are a battle with the idea of death. The infinite series I made at the beginning of my career was a way for me to not face that. It’s a great way to imagine that you will last forever—even though you won’t.” (D. Hirst, quoted in A. McDonald, “In the Studio: Damien Hirst’s Veil Paintings,” Gagosian Quarterly, July 4, 2020). Ever the sly philosopher, Hirst’s quips about time and eternity bring a metaphysical air to these chromatic celebrations.

Realized on a massive scale, Hirst’s Veil series continues his fascination with painting in a celebratory mode that he started with the Visual Candy paintings in the 1990s. Unlike those earlier works, pieces like Veil of Hidden Meaning tower over the viewer as monuments to abstract painting. Though it contains a multitude of tones, Hirst applies each dot to the canvas as a pure color over, under, and on top of its neighbors without aggressive smearing or mixing. Referencing the Impressionists and Pointillist painters like Georges Seurat, he creates optically rich fields of dots that merge and swim in the viewer’s eye not unlike Kusama’s ‘infinity nets’, though with a markedly different motivating idea.

 

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Color Space Paintings

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Ocean Spray, 2016

Christie’s New-York: 14 May 2024
Estimated: USD 350,000 – 550,000
USD 882,000

23171 Hirst, Ocean Spray (shorthandstories.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Ocean Spray, 2016
Household gloss on canvas
67×79 inches (170×200 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘2016 ‘Ocean Spray’ Damien Hirst’ (on the reverse)
Signed again ‘Damien Hirst’ (on the stretcher)

Across a dazzling expansive surface, Ocean Spray presents a vast sea of Technicolor dots. Impasto daubs of red, pale blue, lilac and bubble-gum pink paint seem to flutter like confetti over the white ground of the canvas. The work is one of Damien Hirst’s Color Space paintings—a series from 2016 that represents an evolution from his seminal series of Spot paintings begun thirty years earlier. Launched in the same year as his acclaimed Veil paintings, the vibrant Color Space works mark the artist’s enduring obsessions with chromatic maximalism, formal deconstruction, and art history.

Where Hirst’s Spot paintings can be distinguished by their hard-edge Minimalist sensibility—flat circles of color were rendered with the mathematical precision of a machine in neat, parallel rows—his Colour Space paintings relish in a new-found painterly expression. Sterile grids give way to loose and unbridled gesture, and indeed, Ocean Spray is enriched by traces of human touch. The colorful, imperfect discs of paint seem to dance across the canvas, skimming like stones and leaving accidental splatters and drips. The surface pulsates with movement, denoting an improvised and spontaneous creation that nods to the all-over canvases of Abstract Expressionist titan Jackson Pollock. Though some of the formal rules upheld by the Spots remain—no same color is repeated, and each dot is consistently sized—here, beyond an exercise in pictorial deconstruction, Hirst harnesses abstraction for its emotive capacity.

Jackson Pollock, Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950 (nga.gov)

Standing before Ocean Spray and its expansive field of twinkling dots, one is reminded of late-nineteenth-century Impressionist and Post-Impressionist techniques, of warm Pointillist seascapes in Southern France by Signac and Seurat, or Monet’s dappled water garden at Giverny. Painting directly from nature—en plein air—these artists broke new ground by responding to the ever-changing effects of natural light and atmosphere. Organic daubs of color squeezed straight from the tube fractured the environment to its smallest constituent particles.

Here, as is consistent across his maverick practice, Hirst too considers the very nature of perception and representation. The titles selected for the Colour Space paintings have their own double-edged significance. Terms like Ocean Spray, Reed, Morning Dew, and Black Thistle imply a poetic, figurative quality, yet are in fact derived from the generic color names for domestic house paints. Executed over a century after the French Impressionists rose to fame, in an age of digital screens and pixelated surfaces, the present work upholds the dot as “the most basic unit of creativity” (B. Gopnik, “Damien Hirst: Colour Space Paintings”, Gagosian Quarterly, 22 June 2020).

Diva, 2016

Christie’s London: 28 June 2022
Estimated: GBP 500,000 – 700,000
GBP 604,800 / USD 738,191

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Diva, 2016
Household gloss on canvas
94×59 inches (238.8 x 149.9 cm)
Signed, titled, and dated (on the reverse)
Signed ‘Damien Hirst’ (on the stretcher)

Part of Damien Hirst’s celebrated Color Space cycle, Diva is a thrilling chromatic symphony that featured in the artist’s 2018 exhibition dedicated to the series at Houghton Hall, Norfolk. Across its vast surface, spanning nearly two and a half metres, Hirst creates a kaleidoscopic web of tonalities, his dots mingling and colliding amid drips and splashes of paint. Created in 2016, Hirst’s Color Space paintings were conceived as an extension of his seminal Spot Paintings, begun exactly thirty years prior. While these works came to be known for their rigorous grid-like structures, each spot precisely and meticulously placed, the Color Space paintings hark back to Hirst’s very first Spots, which were more intuitively and spontaneously rendered. Three decades after the young artist had rejected the temptations of free gestural expression, here he embraced it anew, relishing the chaotic, messy delight of paint. In doing so, he gave new form to the themes that had always underpinned his oeuvre: the randomness of human existence, and the power of art to make sense of it.

Hirst’s Color Space paintings cleaved to the same basic principles as the Spots. No color was repeated within any given canvas, and the dot size remained consistent within each work. Beyond this, however, there were no formal rules regarding the placement and execution of the dots, or indeed the orientation of the finished painting. Inspired early on by his encounters with Minimalism and Gerhard Richter’s Color Charts, the young Hirst had famously claimed that he wanted his Spot Paintings to ‘look like they’ve been made by a person trying to paint like a machine’ (D. Hirst, quoted in conversation with S. Calle, Internal Affairs, London 1991, unpaged).

His decision to name them after chemical compounds was part and parcel of this idea, invoking humankind’s attempts to catalogue the chaos of the universe. In the Color Space paintings, by contrast, Hirst openly embraced human error, capturing ‘the fallibility of the human hand in the drips and inconsistencies’ (D. Hirst, quoted in Damien Hirst: Color Space Paintings, exh. cat Gagosian, New York 2018, p. 1). While the Spot Paintings were conceived as an endless cycle, Color Space was a finite series completed within a single year: a controlled snapshot of our own unpredictability.

 

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Blossoms

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Momentary Love Blossom, 2018

Property from the Laurence and Patrick Seguin Collection, Paris
Sotheby’s New-York: 18 November 2025
Estimated: USD 2,500,000 – 3,500,000
USD 3,040,000

Momentary Love Blossom | The Now & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2025 | Sotheby’s

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Momentary Love Blossom, 2018
Oil on canvas
144×108 inches (365.8 x 274.3 cm)
Signed, titled, dated 2018 and variously inscribed (on the reverse)
Signed (on the stretcher)

A resplendent constellation of blushing pinks, verdant greens, and sunlit whites unfolding against a crystalline blue sky, Damien Hirst’s Momentary Love Blossom envelops the viewer in a triumphant vision of nature’s renewal. Through luscious, cascading daubs of impasto, Hirst conjures the intoxicating splendor of spring within a dense tapestry of painterly gestures that seem to radiate with vitality. Here, his petals drift outward, some untethered, floating against the sea of azure, capturing, as the title suggests, a fleeting moment suspended in time.

“The Cherry Blossoms are about beauty and life and death. They’re extreme—there’s something almost tacky about them, like Jackson Pollock twisted by love. They’re decorative but taken from nature. They’re about desire and how we process the things around us and what we turn them into, but also about the insane visual transience of beauty—a tree in full crazy blossom against a clear sky.”

Damien Hirst in his studio, 2020. PHOTO by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Art © 2025 Damien Hirst

Executed in 2018, Momentary Love Blossom epitomizes Hirst’s celebrated Cherry Blossom series, a body of work that revels in the transient beauty of spring while embodying the artist’s career-long fascination with capturing the dichotomy between life and impermanence. Cherry blossoms bloom spectacularly yet only momentarily. As such, they serve as a metaphor for all life and echo the tension explored in Hirst’s early Natural History series, featuring creatures suspended in formaldehyde, between fleeting beauty and the fragility of life. The present work bears remarkable provenance as it comes from the esteemed collection of Laurence and Patrick Seguin and is further distinguished for its inclusion in Hirst’s first exhibition of the series at Fondation Cartier in 2021-22.

Gustav Klimt, Flower Garden, 1905-07. Private Collection. Image © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images

In Momentary Love Blossom, Hirst reimagines the genre of landscape painting with a playful wit, amalgamating the chromatic delicacy of Pointillism with the gestural bravado and spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism. Through this fusion of painterly influences, Hirst both pays homage to and subverts the great artistic movements of the late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Rooted in the art historical lineages of Monet’s depictions of his garden at Giverny and Pollock’s gestural abstractions, Momentary Love Blossom exemplifies Hirst’s fusion of control and chaos. While his earlier Spot Paintings imposed a mechanical order upon color, the Cherry Blossom series embraces its wild liberation. In the present work, the artist’s hand is unmistakably present, his brush dancing, daubing, and stippling across the canvas with exuberant abandon.

Joan Mitchell, Wood ,Wind, No Tuba, 1980. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Art © Estate of Joan Mitchell

Against a serene expanse of sky, the branches surge upward, their bursts of pink and white petals rendered with tactile immediacy. The surface hums with motion, and one senses the artist’s own physical energy, the very act of painting, as integral to the work’s life force.

“It’s been so good to make them, to be completely lost in color and in paint in my studio. They’re garish and messy and fragile and about me moving away from Minimalism and the idea of an imaginary mechanical painter, and that’s so exciting for me.” 

The present work installed in the residence of Laurence and Patrick Seguin, Paris. Art © 2025 Damien Hirst

“I’ve got an obsession with death,
but I think it’s like a celebration of life rather than something morbid.
You can’t have one without the other. I feel alive when I’m painting them.
So I’m putting my life into it… all that energy of life is actually caught in the paint.” 

Emerging as among the most lyrical explorations in Hirst’s career, Momentary Love Blossom extends his enduring fascination with the dualities of existence: life and death, beauty and decay, permanence and transience. The cherry blossom, long a symbol of ephemerality, serves as an apt metaphor for the artist’s philosophical inquiry. Its fragile petals bloom in abundance only to soon disperse, a poignant reminder of the impermanence that shadows even the most beautiful moments. In Momentary Love Blossom, this meditation on impermanence becomes a radiant affirmation of life’s fleeting joy.

PB806. Spellbound Blossom, 2021

Phillips online: 11 March 2025
Estimated: USD 50,000 – 70,000
USD 69,850

Damien Hirst – Modern & Contemporary… Lot 1 February 2025 | Phillips

In 2023, HENI Gallery in London released Paper Blossoms, a collection of 900 unique paintings by Damien Hirst that utilize the visual language of the artist’s Cherry Blossoms works. Hirst worked on multiple Paper Blossoms paintings at a time, moving around his studio with the canvases placed side-by-side on long tables.

The exciting dynamism underscoring the artist’s working method is reflected in the tactile exuberance of the works. Layers of pink, red and white oil paint are built up into thick impasto that dots the sky-blue backgrounds, imbuing the works with a palpable cadence and rhythm.

Happy Life Blossom, 2018

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2022
Estimated: USD 2,000,000 – 3,000,000
USD 5,609,900

Happy Life Blossom | The Now Evening Auction | 2022 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Happy Life Blossom, 2018
Oil on canvas, in two parts
Each: 108 x 72.2 inches (274.2 x 183.3 cm)
Signed, titled, dated and variously inscribed (on the reverse left panel)
Titled, dated and variously inscribed (on the reverse right panel)

An effervescent kaleidoscope of rosy pinks, verdant greens, and creamy whites before a field of sky blue, Damien Hirst’s Happy Life Blossom engulfs the viewer in a floral landscape that perfectly captures the euphoria of spring. In its monumental scale, the diptych immerses the viewer within a sensory experience akin to standing beneath the magnificent beauty of a Sakura tree. Executed in 2018, Happy Life Blossom belongs to Hirst’s recent series of Cherry Blossom paintings that he completed in his time spent in the isolation of his studio during the COVID-19 lockdown, a dreary moment to which he responded by creating paintings imbued with radiant positivity.

 

Paintings from Cherry Blossom series were prominently exhibited at Paris’s Fondation Cartier in 2021 and travelled to Tokyo’s National Art Center in 2022, Hirst’s first major solo exhibitions in both France and Japan respectively. Offering a playful tribute to the lineages of Impressionism, Pointillism, and Action Painting, the present work explodes in its combination of thickly encrusted impasto brushwork and the dynamism of gestural painting to mark Hirst’s triumphant return to the traditional medium after having worked in sculpture for the past decade. Rendered in bespeckled and splattered paint across a brightly colored palette, Happy Life Blossom affirms Hirst’s joyful infatuation with color.

“I believe all painting and art should be uplifting for the viewer… I love color. I feel it inside me. It gives me a buzz.”

Filled with the vivacious optimism that its title suggests, Happy Life Blossom offers a sentimental ode to the rejuvenation of spring and a mesmerizing testament to Hirst’s career-long exploration of color.

Recalling both the action painting of Jackson Pollock and the Pointillism of Georges Seurat, with Happy Life Blossom Hirst abandons the formal rules he had established for himself in previous series, marking a critical shift in his artistic career as well as the ultimate realization of it. A radical departure from the meticulous and mechanical order of dots that famously structured his Spot series, Happy Life Blossom sees the artist’s painterly hand as he confidently applies dense layers of bright pinks, yellows, and greens to evince a dynamic range of art historical styles. In contrast to the artist’s trademark minimalistic grid, the present work opens an illusionistic view before a clear blue sky and immerses the viewer within the wild expanse of the cherry blossoms as they bloom with colorful buoyancy. Painted with an ebullient gusto, the spectrum of colors which inspired and organized Hirst’s spots and pills now burst with beaming joy in an artistic process which, like the seasons, has now come full circle.

“I’ve had a romance with painting all my life, even if I avoided it. As a young artist, you react to the context… In the 1980s, painting wasn’t really the way to go.”

“I’ve got an obsession with death, but I think it’s like a celebration of life rather than something morbid. You can’t have one without the other.”

In Happy Life Blossom, Hirst renders the motif of the cherry blossom as a continuation of his artistic exploration of the tensions between life and death; like the butterfly, an insect that Hirst returns to throughout his work to signify themes of life, death, and resurrection through its metamorphic life cycle, the cherry blossom is here a universal symbol of ephemerality and change. Though the blossom only appears briefly to herald the arrival of spring, Hirst suspends it here in a scintillating vision that wavers between figuration and abstraction. In the immediacy of their bloom that anticipates their inevitable disappearance from the branches of the tree, the cherry blossoms of Happy Life Blossom mesmerize the viewers and extends Hirst’s primary philosophical inquiry about life and death.

 

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(Medicine) Cabinets

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Hirst created his first Medicine Cabinets in 1989 for his degree show at Goldsmiths in London and was so fascinated by the endless possible permutations and the potential behind the idea that he continued to refine the concept to increasing levels of precision. In an interview with art historian and curator Nicholas Serota, Hirst recalled the creation of the early works in the series:

“In the first twelve, I’d done all that arranging in the same way that I was doing in a painting. I’d played around with them for ages and moved things and then it was as if I wasn’t there when I’d done it. So I think it was a way for me to do that, without ramming it down people’s throats. You can’t do paintings like Rauschenberg forever.”

In the same interview the artist declared that the first of his works that he was ever truly satisfied with was a Medicine Cabinet, indicating the immense significance of the series within his early career.

1. Medicine Cabinets

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Never Mind, 1990-1991

Christie’s London: 15 October 2025
Estimated: GBP 600,000 – 900,000
GBP 508,000 / USD 680,720

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965), Never Mind | Christie’s

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Never Mind, 1990-1991
Glass, MDF, ramin, plastic, aluminium, resin and pharmaceutical packaging
54x40x9 inches (137.2 x 101.5 x 23 cm)

With its line-up of boxed and bottled medicaments arranged in neat rows within a glass-fronted cabinet, Damien Hirst’s Never Mind (1990-1991) is among the earliest of the artist’s celebrated Medicine Cabinets. Its title alludes to the 1977 Sex Pistols’ album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, ironically juxtaposing a precise, clinical sense of order with the iconic punk band’s rallying cry for chaos. Never Mind belongs to a group of Medicine Cabinets known as the ‘B-sides’, executed after an initial suite of twelve cabinets whose titles each corresponded to one of the album’s tracks: examples from that series include Pretty Vacant, now in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and E.M.I., in Munich’s Museum Brandhorst. A year later Hirst would take this seminal motif to thrilling new heights with Pharmacy, an installation now in the collection of Tate, London.

Following the breakout group show Freeze that Hirst organized along with other Goldsmiths College art students in 1988, Hirst rose to fame in the early 1990s as the enfant terrible of the Young British Artists. His works of this period—including the Spot Paintings and the Natural History vitrines, which featured animals preserved in formaldehyde—have become some of the most iconic in modern art. As with those series, the Medicine Cabinets set out a theme which would endure through Hirst’s entire oeuvre: that of the relationship of art to religion, science, life, and death.

“I’ve always loved the idea of art maybe, you know, curing people. And I have this kind of obsession with the body.”

The Sex Pistols (Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, Steve Jones and Paul Cook) during a press conference in London, March 10, 1977.
Unknown photographer. Digital image: Bridgeman Images.

 The earliest Medicine Cabinets were filled with pharmaceutical packaging given to Hirst by his grandmother, shortly before she passed away. Hirst sometimes arranged the bottles and boxes of pills and potions according to their purpose, with medications for the head placed on the upper shelf, and those for the remainder of the body arranged in descending order. A poignant memento mori, Hirst’s depleted prescription medications become a record of life, and the ways in which the body is sustained.

Finding a precedent in Andy Warhol’s iconic Brillo boxes and Jeff Koons’s series of ‘new’ consumer products, the Medicine Cabinets combined the Duchampian tradition of the readymade with a postmodern elimination of the line between art and everyday life. Hirst played with the idea of legibility, intrigued at the thought that medical professionals might seek meaning in their arrangement, while others would find their labels—laden with complex chemical compounds—impenetrable. They play, too, with the language of Minimalism, recalling the clean lines of Sol LeWitt or Donald Judd. But the Medicine Cabinets complicated both the modernist grid and Pop’s slick veneer, their carefully-arranged contents a record of something distinctly human.

Gerhard Richter, 180 Farben, 1971. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Artwork and image: © 2025 Gerhard Richter (0106).

Hirst saw the pharmacy as akin to a place of worship, with the sick turning to modern medicine for salvation as they once prayed to the gods. With Never Mind, he erects a pantheon of drugs contained, votive-like, within a vitrine. Simultaneously, he contrasts society’s unfailing faith in medicine against the incredulity and scorn so often expressed towards contemporary art. Juxtaposing different systems of belief, Never Mind binds together threads of religion, medicine, and art.

Phillippe de Champaigne, Vanitas: Still Life with a Tulip, Skull and Hour-Glass, 1646. Musée de Tessé, Le Mans.
Digital Image: G. Dagli Orti /© NPL – DeA Picture Library / Bridgeman Images.

Hirst’s fascination with death, which looms inevitably over life, underlies his entire oeuvre.

“I’d always thought about death since I was seven years old … and every day I think about it, it’s different. It goes from being impossible to the only thing. I remember thinking that, in a way, it’s what gives life beauty.”

Anticipating his later works, from the Natural History series of animals preserved in formaldehyde to the meticulous pill cabinets and the gossamer butterflies which adorn bright, monochrome canvases, Hirst’s early Medicine Cabinets offer a meditation on the fragile line between life and death.

Fear, 1994

Phillips London: 13 October 2023
Estimated: GBP 300,000 – 400,000
GBP 349,250 / USD 423,847

Damien Hirst – 20th Century & Contem… Lot 45 October 2023 | Phillips

Clean and precise in its presentation, Fear features rows of meticulously arranged surgical equipment, the cold, impersonal materiality of their sleek, stainless-steel surfaces visually referencing the simple geometries and seriality typically associated with Minimalism. Poignantly underscored by Hirst’s use of the medicine packets that his grandmother left behind after her death in these earliest cabinets however, the corporeal messiness of our own bodies is never far from these works, undercutting the more emotionally detached or Minimalist arrangement of its constituent parts. Hirst’s fascination for the interwoven relationships between art, science, and faith have important art historical precedents in the long-held fascination with the human body, its anatomy, and dissection, most famously recorded in the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci and in 17^th century ‘anatomy lesson’ paintings. Significantly, in 2013 Fear was included in the Kunstmuseum de Haag presentation of The Anatomy Lesson: From Rembrandt to Hirst, where it was exhibited alongside all ten surviving anatomy lesson paintings produced in the Netherlands during this Enlightenment period, most notably Rembrandt’s masterwork of the Dutch Golden Age, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaas Tulp.

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicoleas Tulp, 1632, Mauritshuis, The Hague

A gory spectacle, dissections were opened to public viewings once a year, taking place in theatres that still lend their name to the more clinical spaces of hospital operating rooms today. Commissioned by the Surgeons Guild for display in their meeting room, in The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaas Tulp the young Rembrandt radically altered the conventions of the genre. Set with dramatic contrasts of light and shadow, the mis en scène depicts the titular doctor exposing the musculature of the dissection subject’s arm to a group of fascinated onlookers. Drawing on Christ-like iconography in the artist’s presentation of the corpse, the painting crystalizes the profound shift taking place across 17^th century Europe as Enlightenment principles related to the pursuit of science, rationality, and the so-called triumph of reason challenged religion’s hitherto unwavering dominance as a framework for explaining the world.  Like Rembrandt, in Fear Hirst draws on our compelling desire to make the unknown visible, the drive to demystify death and the deep anxieties provoked by an awareness of our own mortality. Playing on the densely woven web of fears and fascinations that has always characterized our relationship to medicine and the surgeon’s trade, the Instruments Cabinets also function in this respect like religious reliquaries, playing on our capacity for hope and belief, even in the face of impersonal and inevitable death.

The Sleep of Reason, 1997-1998

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
The Sleep of Reason, 1997-1998
Glass, stainless steel, steel, nickel, brass, rubber and pharmaceutical packaging
Overall: 98 x 144 7/8 x 11 1/4 inches (249 x 368 x 28.6 cm)

We’re Afraid of Nothing, 1992

Sotheby’s London: 2 March 2022
Estimated: GPB 1,000,000 – 1,500,000
GBP 1,366,000 / USD 1,825,959

We’re Afraid of Nothing | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2022 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
We’re Afraid of Nothing, 1992
Glass, painted MDF, ramin, steel, aluminium, pharmaceutical packaging and step ladder
Cabinet: 183 x 274.5 x 30.5 cm (72x108x12 inches)
Ladder: 210x48x11 cm (82 1/2 x 18 7/8 x 4 1/4 inches)

Executed in 1992 and monumental in scale, We’re Afraid of Nothing hails from the earliest period of Damien Hirst’s ground-breaking career and echoes the themes most integral to the artist’s visual lexicon: life and death and the precarious threshold in between. Comprising row upon row of neatly arranged pharmaceutical boxes and bottles bearing cautionary labels, the present work stands alongside important, early examples of Hirst’s iconic corpus of Medicine Cabinets, of which numerous are held within museum collections, such as The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Pretty Vacant, 1989) and the Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen München (E.M.I., 1989). With the addition of a ladder that serves to heighten the immersive quality of this body of work, We’re Afraid of Nothing denotes the crystallization of Hirst’s visual engagement with pharmaceuticals – an extensive and highly significant engagement that found its ultimate articulation the very same year this work was created with the full-scale Pharmacy installation. As a work that encompasses the breadth of the artist’s output to date, We are Afraid of Nothing represents the moment at which the dialogue between science, religion, art and death coalesced to form the very backbone of Hirst’s oeuvre.

The Medicine Cabinet works stand alongside Hirst’s iconic series of Pharmaceutical Paintings, more commonly referred to as the Spot Paintings, in their investigation into mortality and medicinal science. Indeed, each painting in the series is titled after exotic sounding pharmaceutical substances listed in the Sigma Chemical Company’s catalogue Biochemical Organic Compounds for Research and Diagnostic Reagents. Conceived at the same pivotal moment in Hirst’s career, both series are imbued with the same measured rational order and pleasing formal cogency of his iconic Pharmacy store vitrines; yet where the brightly colored Spot Paintings conceptually denote specific drugs, the Medicine Cabinet works instead offer model replicas of such drugs, encased in vibrant, pristine medical packaging equipped with warning labels and dosage instructions. In its carefully selected assortment of medical packages, boxes and bottles enclosed within its eight shelves, We are Afraid of Nothing signifies the progression of existence itself, presenting the ‘tools’ required to maintain a long and healthy life – or indeed the tools required to evade death.

Quo Vadis, 2005

Christie’s London: 2 July 2021
Estimated: GBP 250,000 – 200,000
GBP 150,000 / USD 206,925

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Quo Vadis, 2005
Glass, painted MDF, aluminum, metal pins, nickel-plated steel, sliding door lock and pharmaceutical packaging
24x36x6 inches (61 x 91.4 x 15.2 cm)
Signed, dedicated and dated ‘for Jasper Morrison Thanks for everything you did for me at the Pharmacy love Damien Hirst 2005/06’ (on the reverse)

Created in 2005, Damien Hirst’s Quo Vadis aestheticises the wonders of science. The work comes from the collection of Jasper Morrison, the acclaimed designer who collaborated with Hirst on the furniture for the Notting Hill restaurant Pharmacy. As its name suggests, Hirst’s establishment resembled a pharmacy; it opened in 1998, coinciding with artist’s homonymous installation at Tate Britain. Displayed across Quo Vadis’s four shelves is a tidy arrangement of amber-tinted medicinal bottles, packets, and miraculous tinctures. Their presence collectively speaks to the fragility of the body, but like the white walls of a gallery, the sleek glass shelves of the present work render these ordinary objects strange and beguiling. Indeed, under Hirst’s deft hand, the medicines move further away from their original function, and in doing so, they become aesthetic objects with wider cultural connotations.

“I’ve always seen medicine cabinets as bodies, but also like a cityscape or civilization with some sort of hierarchy within it. It’s also like a contemporary museum of the Middle Ages. In 100 years’ time this will look like an old apothecary. A museum of something that’s around today.”

For Hirst, the pharmacy has long been a site of magical possibility and blind faith. Visiting a drugstore with his mother, Hirst noticed the ‘complete trust’ she had in medicine’s ability to improve her life; it was a conviction whose origins he could not identify. Such curative potential is contained within the cabinet of Quo Vadis, whose shrine-like composition evokes salvation and healing. By reflecting society’s utter confidence in medical science, Quo Vadis visualizes the connection between modern medicine and religion, a confidence alluded to in the title of the present work—and transferred it to the artwork itself.

2. Other Cabinets

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A Collection of Helmets and Swords (with Scabbards)
from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, 2010

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2023
Estimated: USD 600,000 – 800,000
USD 698,500

A Collection of Helmets and Swords (with Scabbards) from the Wreck of the Unbelievable | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b.1965)
A Collection of Helmets and Swords (with Scabbards) from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, 2010
Glass, powder-coated aluminum, painted MDF, silicone, stainless steel and bronze
94 1/2 x 122 x 20 3/4 inches (240x310x53 cm)
This work is number 2 from an edition of 3 plus 2 artist’s proofs

Yes, but how do you really feel, 1996

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 27 April 2022
Estimated: HKD 6,000,000 – 8,000,000
HKD 7,560,000 / USD 963,450

Damien Hirst 達米恩・赫斯特 | Yes, but how do you really feel 是的，但你的真實感受如何 | Contemporary Evening Auction | 2022 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Yes, but how do you really feel, 1996
Stainless steel, glass and six plastic skeletons
249x378x51 cm (98 x 138 7/8 x 20 1/8 inches)

Yes, but how do you really feel exemplifies Hirst’s use of found objects or the Duchampian “readymades” in his oeuvre, exhibiting six plastic skeletons in pristine stainless steel-framed display boxes. In his 2008 interview with the artist on the occasion of Sotheby’s Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, Gordon Burn noted how Hirst’s early work, along with the work of the Young British Artists (YBA) with whom he was associated, was characterized by the use of “impoverished materials, mundane objects like cigarette ends, old mattresses, fried eggs, old toilets and sinks”—ultimately, what Burn described as a process of “transforming crap into art” (Gordon Burn, “Gordon Burn in conversation with Damien Hirst, Stroud studio, Friday 27 June 2008” in Sotheby’s, Damien Hirst: Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, London, 2008, n.p.). As argued by art historian Petra Lange-Berndt, the seriality of the skeletons not only functions “as an artistic strategy to counteract the model of uniqueness and notions of artistic subjectivity” (Petra Lange-Berndt, “Replication and Decay in Damien Hirst’s Natural History”, Tate, Autumn 2007, online), but here, the repetition of the skeletons is also a reminder of the universality of death. Overall, in his serial presentation of the skeletons, Hirst not only continues in the footsteps of the likes of Marcel Duchamp in his adoption of the “readymade”, but also follows in the lineage of Pop masters such as Andy Warhol and his serial works.

DAMIEN HIRST, WITH DEAD HEAD, 1991
© DAMIEN HIRST AND SCIENCE LTD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, DACS 2018. PHOTO: ANDRÚ MORIN-LE-JEUNE

The idea of death has long preoccupied Hirst, as definitively demonstrated here in Yes, but how do you really feel. By depicting each of the skeletons in their own glass coffin, close to but separated from the skeletons around them and distanced from the viewer. In an interview with Gordon Burn, Hirst quotes the expression, “there’s no pockets in a shroud”, a reminder that wealth on earth cannot be kept and used after death. In Yes, but how do you really feel, Hirst evokes Kilroy J. Oldster’s declaration that “death is the great equalizer of human beings”—we are all the same in death. Eschewing any backdrop or the inclusion of cultural or social signifiers in the work, each of the skeletons is presented in the same, scientific way.

Without You, 2008

Phillips London: 3 March 2022
Estimated: GBP 500,000 – 700,000
GBP 627,500 / USD 835,886

Damien Hirst – 20th Century & Contempo… Lot 37 March 2022 | Phillips

Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991, Image: Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates, Artwork: © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS /Artimage 2022

In characteristically glib fashion, Hirst described the sculpture as having ‘to do with the obsession with trying to make the dead live or the living live forever.’ⁱ Like this infamous work, Without You draws on the conceptual difficulties involved in imagining our own mortality, the formaldehyde acting not simply as a chemical agent to preserve the creatures, but as a means of trying to approach this philosophical question aesthetically. Removed from their natural habitat and placed in 91 individual formaldehyde-filled Perspex boxes, the multiple varieties of fish appear to sit suspended somewhere between life and death, arranged in such a way that they almost seem to be swimming, absurdly frozen in time.

Tellingly, Hirst’s first fish cabinet, the 1991 diptych Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same Direction for the Purpose of Understanding (Left) and (Right), was also included in the Young British Artists exhibition, emphasizing the foundational position held by these wall cabinets within Hirst’s oeuvre. While the lone tiger shark confronts the sense of paradox and dissonance involved in our attempts to imagine the permanence of death, there is an added poignance involved in the fish cabinet’s juxtapositions of life, movement, and the collective with sterility, suspension, and isolation.

“They all face the same way yet they can’t make contact the way they do in the sea […] in life we’re separated by flesh and bones and you can’t really move beyond that.”

Belonging to the highly personal Internal Affairs series, Isolated Elements and its sister works have been described by the artist as an exercise in ‘looking into myself, to try to work out why my body is separated from my mind or indeed if it is’, something that is clearly picked up by the title and visual format of Without You. Raising questions about induvial difference and conformity as well as the fragile line between life and death, Hirst borrows the visual languages of Minimalism, museum display, and scientific enquiry, using the mechanism of the 19^th century display cabinet to take a wry look at the human drive to set chaos into order and to extract permanence from an otherwise fleeting existence.

Precious Moments, 2011-2012

Phillips London: 15 October 2021
Estimated: GBP 1,000,0000 – 1,500,000
GBP 990,500 / USD 1,362,635

Damien Hirst – 20th Century & Contem… Lot 25 October 2021 | Phillips

Conceptually connected to the meticulously organized medicine cabinets that date back to Damien Hirst’s Goldsmiths degree show in 1989, the large-scale diamond cabinet Precious Moments draws together key themes of beauty, mortality, belief, and value that have preoccupied the artist throughout his career. Combining compositional elegance with a commitment to seriality informed by Minimalism, rows of exactly spaced diamonds appear to float end to end within the stainless-steel cabinet, carefully arranged across glass shelves and separated from us by a sliding glass door.

Throughout his career, and especially across his varied cabinets, Hirst has explored the systems of belief erected to organize human experience: faith in religion, in medicine, and in consumerism – all brought into kaleidoscopic view with Precious Moments. Overtly invoking the sick or ailing body, Hirst’s pharmaceuticals are themselves subject to an analogous decay and degradation. Hard-edged, clean-cut and exquisitely incorruptible, diamonds, by contrast remain untouched by the passing of time. Forcing a meditation on our own mortality, Hirst’s poignantly ironic title underscores this fleeting ephemerality, and of our desire to possess something eternal in the face of our own certain death. Drawing fascinating visual parity between the alluring window displays of jeweller’s shops, altarpieces, and the 19th century mania for collecting and categorizing specimens of all description in ‘Curiosity Cabinets’, Precious Moments makes a blunt point about the functioning of consumerism as a system of knowledge in the modern age.

Domenico Remps, Cabinet of Curiosities, 1690s, Opificio delle pietre dure, Florence

Operating as proto-museums, the earliest Curiosity Cabinets or ‘wunderkammers’ attempted to impose rational order onto a chaotic world through collection and classification, and as such were ‘central to conceptions of knowledge and how its results were to be displayed […] so that they inhabited the same physical space and conceptual space’. A potent symbol of man’s hubristic pursuit of knowledge, they speak not only to a desire to collect and categorize, but to an Enlightenment faith in progress and the pursuit of rationality. In its dazzling allure, Precious Moments also draws on the aesthetics of display associated with certain religious practices. Like the earliest curiosity cabinets which presented visual proofs of the rational pursuit of knowledge as a means of combating the persistence of magic and superstition in our collective imagination, altarpieces and reliquaries operated according to the same visual logic.

Ornately decorated containers designed specially to hold the remains of supposed saints, reliquary shrines functioned as the visual proof of Divine will and a universe structured according to it. Enshrined in its pristine glass cabinet, Precious Moments adopts this set of visual codes, protecting a very different kind of sacred object and presenting itself as an altarpiece for the age of commodity capitalism. In the context of Medieval visual culture, the Reliquary also functioned, not only as tangible proof of the existence of God and the performance of miracles, but as a Memento mori – a visual reminder of the inevitability of death in the midst of life. Like the spectacular medieval altarpiece or Reliquary, Precious Moments highlights the role of display in the maintenance of certain belief systems, and of the inevitability of death. As such, it draws itself into a direct dialogue with one of Damien Hirst’s most iconic works, For the Love of God.

Executed in 2007 the year before the first diamond cabinet was made, For The Love of God is a diamond-encrusted platinum cast of an 18^th century human skull which Brian Dillon has aptly described as ‘Nothing more or less than an alchemical object: a death’s-head sublimed (as alchemists traditionally put it) out of base organic matter and into the stuff of wealth and glamour, certainly, but also the stuff of an inhuman immortality.’ Like this definitive work, Precious Moments represents Hirst’s ongoing integration of questions of mortality, permanence and value through a complex body of work where the ‘model of the museum vitrine and its precursor, the cabinet of curiosities; the aesthetics of commercial display and advertising; scientific and medical imagery; religious motifs; all are merged’ in the artist’s visual syntax. A summation of Hirst’s artistic vision, in its oblique contemplation of death Precious Moments is a glorious celebration of life, death being, in the artist’s own words, ‘what gives life its beauty.’

The Body of Christ, 2005

Property from the Collection of Ella Fontanals-Cisneros with Proceeds to partially Benefit the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO)
Sotheby’s New-York: 26 September 2025
Estimated: USD 800,000 – 1,200,000
PASSED

The Body of Christ | Contemporary Curated | 2025 | Sotheby’s

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
The Body of Christ, 2005
Glass, stainless steel, steel, aluminum, nickel, paracetamol pills and blood
72 7/8 x 47 3/8 x 4 inches (185.3 x 120.3 x 10.2 cm)

Hundreds of chalk-white Paracetamol pills, affixed with blood to tightly packed glass shelves, line the mirrored interior of a towering medicine cabinet. Executed in 2005, Damien Hirst’s The Body of Christ forms part of the artist’s celebrated New Religion series and represents a striking meditation on faith, ritual, and mortality. Named after the Eucharist, the work reflects on the transformation of communal worship in an increasingly secular Western world. Where believers once gathered to receive the body of Christ in the form of bread, Hirst proposes that the ritual has been replaced by the consumption of over-the-counter medicine. Just as Raphael conveyed the spiritual grandeur of the Eucharist in his Disputation of the Sacrament, Hirst reimagines its modern counterpart with pharmaceutical clarity and clinical precision.

Raphael, Disputation of the Sacrament, 1509-1510, Apostolic Palace, Vatican Museums, Vatican City

With The Body of Christ, Hirst exposes a profound cultural shift from spiritual to physical consolation. Both the Eucharist and the act of taking a pill are designed to offer relief, yet of different kinds: the former a reminder of divine sacrifice, the latter a temporary reprieve from the body’s ailments. In placing these two gestures in dialogue, Hirst underscores the modern preference for immediate physical comfort over metaphysical belief, transforming the cabinet into both shrine and reliquary for a new, secular faith.

“I suppose I just want people to think, mainly. In this instance, I wanted people to think about the combination of science and religion, basically. People tend to think of them as two very separate things, one cold and clinical, the other emotional, loving, and warm. I wanted to leap over those boundaries and give you something that looks clinical and cold but has all the religious, metaphysical connotations.”

The work draws on one of the most iconic motifs of Hirst’s career: the medicine cabinet. First conceived in 1989, these cabinets quickly became cornerstones of his practice, uniting the artist’s ongoing investigations into science, mortality, and belief. Reflecting both the rational order of a chemist’s display and the reverence of a religious altarpiece, the mirrored shelves of The Body of Christ simultaneously confront viewers with their own reflection and cast pharmaceuticals as the relics of a contemporary ritual system.

Left: Jeff Koons, Three Ball 50/50 Tank (Two Dr. J. Silver Series, One Wilson Supershot), 1985. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Art © 2025 Jeff Koons. Right: Gerhard Richter, 192 Farben, 1966. Private Collection. Sold at Sotheby’s London in October 2022 for £18.3 million ($20.5 million). Art © 2025 Gerhard Richter

The present work is further distinguished by its provenance, originating from the collection of Ella Fontanals-Cisneros to partially benefit the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO). Originally born in Cuba and raised in Venezuela, Fontanals-Cisneros is a philanthropist, entrepreneur, and art collector who has been an instrumental figure in promoting Contemporary art around the world. Fontanals-Cisneros’ collection spans painting, photography, video, and installation, united by her clear commitment to showcasing the depth of human experience and creativity. A work of striking conceptual clarity, The Body of Christ crystallizes the central tenets of Hirst’s oeuvre: the tension between science and religion, the fragility of life, and humanity’s enduring search for transcendence. Unflinching in its critique of modern faith, the work presents a powerful truth, that in a world once united by religious ritual, humanity now turns to pharmaceuticals for consolation, hope, and the fragile promise of immortality.

 

 

3. Record Breakers

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The highest price ever paid at auction for an artwork by Damien Hirst is a medicine cabinet dated 2002, entitled Lullaby Spring, that sold at Sotheby’s on 21 June 2007 for a whooping GBP 9,652,074 (USD 19,232,909).

Lullaby Spring, 2002

Sotheby’s London: 21 June 2007
Estimated: GBP 4,000,000 – 6,000,000
GBP 9,652,074 / USD 19,232,909

(#36) Damien Hirst (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST
Lullaby Spring, 2002
Stainless steel and glass cabinet with painted cast pills
72x108x4 inches (182.9 x 274.3 x 10.2 cm)

Continuing the grand tradition of the history of art from Vivaldi to Poussin and Monet to Twombly, Damien Hirst’s Lullaby Spring takes on that most ever present of allegorical themes, the Four Seasons. Executed in 2002, the present work is one from a series of four unique stainless steel cabinets. While each cabinet shares the same formal structure of glass sliding doors, mirrored backboard and stainless steel casing, each is differentiated by the assortment of pills that are lined up along the razor sharp shelves with the geometric precision of scientific experiment. Individually cast in bronze and intricately hand painted, the unique combination of life-size pills in each cabinet designates the work’s title: Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter.  While in Lullaby Winter the pills are predominantly off-white in accordance with the austere winter months, in Lullaby Spring Hirst presents a life-giving, polychrome array of myriad brightly colored tablets, capsules and lozenges in an allegorical celebration of renewed life worthy of Botticelli’s Primavera. Standing before the pristine, clinical cabinet, the beholder is mesmerized in a kaleidoscopic display of complex color harmonies as the thousands of pills reflect in the gleaming mirror behind, vying against the retina and seemingly multiplying in the process. In this intricate matrix of color, patterns start to emerge which replicate the complexity of the DNA strands that are our source of life.

Evoking the natural cycle of the passing seasons, Lullaby Spring reminds us of the constancy of nature’s rebirth that has continued unabated for thousands of years. As sure as winter will come, so our days on this earth are numbered, ordained by a grand scheme that is beyond our ken or control. Yet in Lullaby Spring, we are presented with a monument to mankind’s attempt to break this cycle of life and death. Filled with the optimism and life-giving quality implied by the title, this array of palliatives and remedies is a testament to the enormity of the accomplishment of modern science in blunting the ravages of disease and prolonging life. An altarpiece to modern medicine, Lullaby Spring enshrines the fundamental tenets of Damien Hirst’s entire oeuvre by interrogating the common ground between the traditionally distinct and antithetical faculties of science and art. Fascinated by the life sciences -pharmacology in particular- many of Hirst’s breakthrough works from the Medicine Cabinets to the Pharmaceutical Paintings leverage the authority and credibility of science to shock the viewer into directly confronting the fundamentals of existence: the hairline divide between life and death.

Lullaby Winter, 2002

Christie’s New-York: 16 May 2007
Estimated: USD 2,500,000 – 3,500,000
USD 7,432,000

Damien Hirst (b. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Lullaby Winter, 2002
Glass, stainless steel and painted cast pills
72x108x4 inches (182.9 x 274.3 x 10.2 cm)

Executed in 2002, Damien Hirst’s Lullaby Winter appears to be a monumental altar to medicine. With its clinical gleam and the reflections of the mirrored background, the myriad different pills are presented as beautiful, colorful commercial objects. They are full of promise, of potential, of power. And at the same time, the overwhelming entirety of this assemblage is strikingly impressive in its own composition, in its formal presentation. Lullaby Winter manages to touch upon many of Hirst’s key concerns: medicine, death, life, reality, art and its curative powers, while also having its own striking formal aesthetic presence. Lullaby Winter is a play not only of faith in medicine and art, but also in reality. For just as there is no medicine in many of the Medicine Cabinets (although there is in others), so too there are in fact no pills in Lullaby Winter. Hirst performs a deft backflip in this work by presenting us with simulacra, with models of pills. These are painted, they are stand-ins, substitutes for the medications that they represent, creating an intriguing additional dimension of play and confusion when compared to the spot paintings on which Lullaby Winter is tangentially based. Thus the role of art and representation comes under the spotlight in a new context.

The Void, 2000

Phillips New-York: 18 May 2007
Estimated: USD 5,000,000 – 7,000,000
USD 5,250,000

Damien Hirst – 20th Century & Contemporar… Lot 8 May 2017 | Phillips

Damien Hirst’s The Void is the largest of his Pill Cabinets ever to come to auction and one of the first he ever made. Within a vast, searching oeuvre, the series of Pill Cabinets make up but a tiny part of the artist’s creative universe. Three of the top seven prices achieved at auction for Hirst’s work are for Pill Cabinets, including the current record for the smaller, later example Lullaby Spring. The Void is the first Pill Cabinet the artist showed in a commercial exhibition – his seminal and celebrated Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results and Findings show at the Gagosian Gallery in New York – and it is the first Pill Cabinet he showed in the United States.

Other examples can be found in such esteemed Foundations as the Broad Museum or the Pinault Foundation, and in museums such as the Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen – Museum Brandhorst in Munich and the Leeum Museum in Seoul. The rarity and significance of the Pill Cabinets series; the importance of this example being the first ever exhibited Stateside; and the monumental scale and dazzling visual complexity of this example, all combine to elevate the prominence of The Void making it one of, if not the most important work of art by Damien Hirst to come to auction.

 

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Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable

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In 2017, the Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana in Venice were transformed into vast spectacles of wonder, filled with glistening artefacts supposedly excavated from the depths of the Indian Ocean after more than two thousand years. The hoard, Hirst’s story told, had once belonged to the legendary collector Cif Amotan II, whose precious cargo was shipwrecked near the ancient trading port of Azania. Blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, the exhibition raised pertinent questions about where we place our faith, suggesting that any encounter with art demands a certain suspension of belief. According to Hirst’s story, the discovered cargo contained the impressive collection of Aulus Calidius Amotan – a freed slave also known as Cif Amotan II – who had amassed this monumental collection of sculptures in the first or second century AD, with the purpose of dedicating it to the temple of the sun. The name of the character is actually an anagram for “I am fiction”. The British artist even produced a Netflix mockumentary about his recovery efforts hinting that the startling discovery was nothing more than fiction.

Since the advent of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymades’, artists have repeatedly grappled with the question of simulacra. Andy Warhol repeated pre-existing images ad infinitum; his works, in turn, were immaculately replicated by Elaine Sturtevant. Jeff Koons conjured impossible treasures through precision engineering, while Banksy placed parodies of artworks in major museums to see if anyone noticed. Hirst’s Medusa—an exquisitely crafted illusion of something that never existed in the first place—sits within this trajectory. Built into the exhibition’s narrative, indeed, was a nod to the complexities of authenticity: the exhibition guide explained that Amotan’s collection of ‘commissions, copies, fakes, purchases and plunders’—some of which were awaiting restoration—were displayed alongside ‘a series of contemporary museum copies’ (Exhibition guide for Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, p. 3). For Hirst, who had previously suspended sharks in formaldehyde and turned medicine cabinets into shining temples, art and myth have always been two sides of the same coin. Here, we are prompted to take a stand, before—under the Medusa’s gaze—we are turned to stone.

Grecian Nude, 2013

Property from an Important Private Collection
Sotheby’s London: 5 March 2026
Estimated: GBP 250,000 – 350,000
GBP 435,200 / USD 581,385

Grecian Nude | Contemporary Day Auction | 2026 | Sotheby’s

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Grecian Nude, 2013
Bronze
73-5/8 x 22-7/8 x 19-3/4 inches (187x58x50 cm)
Incised with the artist’s signature, dated MMXII
Numbered 2/3 and stamped with the foundry mark and Treasures stamp (towards the base)
This work is number 2 from an edition of 3

Grecian Nude belongs to Damien Hirst’s celebrated series of imagined “found treasures,” created for his large-scale 2017 exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable at Punta della Dogana in Venice. An intricate but fictional narrative accompanies the sculptures, claiming that the sculptures had once formed part of the cargo of a ship named Unbelievable (or Apistos in Greek) that sank near the East African coast. The story claims that the works were recovered in 2008 through an archaeological expedition financed by the artist himself. In Venice, several of these sculptures were displayed in a supposed pre-restoration state, covered in coral and marine accretions that sometimes obscured their original forms almost entirely. They were shown alongside replicas of museum artifacts, reinforcing the illusion of historical context.

“One thing that really excites me about the whole project is how you inhabit the past…It’s unknowable really, but what we have a little glimpse of is in fragments and objects of stories…the collection is about belief, and in a way my belief in art is like a belief in God.”

Within Hirst’s mythology, the cargo was said to have belonged to Aulus Calidius Amotan, a freed slave also known as Cif Amotan II, who assembled a vast sculptural collection during the first or second century AD as an offering to the temple of the sun. The name Cif Amotan is an anagram of “I am fiction,” underscoring the fabricated nature of the story. Hirst extended this conceit further by producing a Netflix mockumentary about the supposed recovery, subtly revealing that the sensational discovery was a work of invention.

Marble female figure, attributed to Bastis Master, 2600-2400 BCE
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The exhibition featured multiple variations of the nude torso, all characterized by diminutive waists, accentuated hips, small high breasts and narrow, arched backs. This repetition recalls a classical preference for serial forms, standing in contrast to the modern emphasis on singular originality. Since Marcel Duchamp introduced his first readymades in the early twentieth century, artists have repeatedly examined the role of replication. Grecian Nude, a convincing imitation of a Greek sculpture that may never have existed, aligns with this ongoing dialogue, one also explored by artists such as Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons. As noted in the exhibition guide, the fictional collection of Cif Amotan II comprised “copies, fakes, purchases and plunders,” situating the entire Treasures project within a broader investigation of authenticity. The present work, alongside the other Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, echoes the themes explored by Damien Hirst throughout his career. Like many of Hirst’s works, this sculpture reflects his enduring interest in belief and truth. By challenging the frameworks through which society interprets reality, he encourages reflection on the intersections of mythology, history, and science. The blurred boundaries between fact and invention, as well as between past and present, ultimately call into question the foundations of our convictions and ethical assumptions.

The Severed Head of Medusa, 2013

Christie’s London: 7 December 2023
Estimated: GBP 500,000 – 700,000
GBP 567,000 / USD 711,980

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
The Severed Head of Medusa, 2013
Gold, silver, in artist’s display cabinet
Sculpture: 12 5/8 x 15 5/8 x 15 5/8 inches (32 x 39.7 x 39.7 cm)
Display cabinet: 94 1/2 x 31 1/2 x 31 1/2 inches (240x80x80 cm)
Stamped with the artist’s signature, number, date and foundry mark ‘Damien Hirst 2⁄3 MMX111’
(on the underside)
This work is number two from an edition of three plus two artist’s proofs

Executed in 2013, The Severed Head of Medusa is among the defining works from Damien Hirst’s celebrated project Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable. An extraordinary meditation on art, myth and humanity, it stands as an icon of one of the twenty-first century’s most ambitious technical and conceptual artistic undertakings. The present work’s gleaming gold surface forces us to confront this question head on, impelling us to submit to its illusion.

From pristine simulations of barnacles and coral, to the accompanying Netflix documentary detailing the excavation, the exhibition’s magic was wholly conceived. The catalogue contained entries from leading authorities, including the French underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio, who wrote vividly of his encounters with the treasure. At the back of the book, historical notes purported to shed light upon the objects’ origins and significance. ‘Imbued with great apotropaic powers, the Gorgon—depicted here following her decapitation at the hands of Perseus—features repeatedly throughout the collection’, it explained, referring to the present work as well as Hirst’s depictions of Medusa in bronze, crystal glass and malachite. ‘The different versions emphasise the fluidity of Medusa’s character and the unique combination of themes she personifies … Once severed, her head retained extraordinary transformative properties: Ovid relayed that it was Medusa’s blood, dripping from her neck onto twigs and seaweed strands, and still harbouring the power of petrification, that accounted for the existence of coral’ (D. Hirst, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, exh. cat. Palazzo Grassi, Punta della Dogana, Venice 2017, p. 326).

The present work is particularly notable in its appeal to a pre-existing legend. In Greek mythology, the snake-haired Medusa was one of the three Gorgons, whose gaze had the power to turn their onlookers to stone. Her likeness had been imagined time and again in art: from the sculptures of antiquity to Caravaggio and beyond. Hirst’s version, in this sense, was simply another chapter in her story, his sleight of hand adding a new dimension to the Medusa’s steely gaze. All impressions of the Gorgon, after all, had borrowed their inspiration from a handed-down story, its truth only half known. In the same vein, one might just as easily entertain the tale of Amotan, a former slave from Antioch who, between the mid-first and early-second centuries CE, built a fortune large enough to acquire an incomparable collection. Only the keenest observers would note that ‘Cif Amotan II’ was an anagram of ‘I am a fiction’; the name of the ill-fated ship, moreover—Apistos—translated to ‘unbelievable’ in Koine Greek.

Skull of a Unicorn, 2010

Sotheby’s London: 28 June 2023
Estimated: GBP 180,000 – 250,000
GBP 228,600 / USD 288,818

Skull of a Unicorn | Modern & Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Skull of a Unicorn, 2010
Silver
49.2 x 8.9 x 29.7 inches (125 x 22.6 x 75.5 cm)
Incised with the artist’s signature
Numbered 1/3 and stamped with the artist’s foundry stamp on the underside of the skull
This work is number 1 from an edition of 3, plus 2 artist’s proofs

Skull of a Unicorn from 2010 is a powerful continuation of Damien’s Hirst’s investigation into the themes of life, death, mythology, and science that pervade his iconic visual practice. The present work is comprised of a sterling silver cast horse’s skull, into which a long horn is embedded from the forehead. The sculpture takes the form of a shimmering unicorn, as Hirst juxtaposes the scientific with the mythical and reality with the supernatural. Skull of a Unicorn was included in Hirst’s prodigious project Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable which debuted at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in April 2017. Hirst’s most ambitious and complex exhibition to date, the show took almost ten years to execute and choreograph, and told the fictional story of the ancient wreck of a large ship, ‘The Unbelievable’ and the legendary discovery of its precious cargo. The ship contained the collection of Aulus Calidius Amotan, a freed slave known as Cif Amotan II, the contents of which were promised to a temple dedicated to the sun. Comprised of approximately 190 works, including sculptures in silver, gold, bronze and marble, the exhibition conveyed on a colossal scale Hirst’s spectacular amalgamation of storytelling, mythology, history and science.

Exhibited at Punta della Dogana in Room 15 of the palace’s outside tower, Skull of a Unicorn was one of many skulls fictionally recovered from the wreckage of The Unbelievable. The sterling silver iteration was accompanied in the exhibition by versions in gold, bronze, rock crystal and aluminium, all of which were presented along-side Skull of a Cyclops in further iterations of Carrara marble, bronze, and aluminium. In the exhibition catalogue these mythical creatures are described scientifically as complex specimen: “The unicorn, or Monoceros, has been depicted in various forms for over 5,000 years. Goblets purporting to be made of unicorn ivory – which were thought to harbour extraordinary antidotal properties – appear amongst the possessions of the elite from the second century CE. It is of note that the spiralling horn… bears a strong resemblance to the tusk of a male narwhal. Centuries after the original object’s loss, tusks belonging to the narwhal…were interpreted as unicorn horns. This narwhal-like horn suggests that the analogy may first have been made on account of copies of this equine skull” (Anon., Exh. Cat., Venice, Palazzo Grassi, Punta della Dogana, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable: Damien Hirst, 2017, p. 44-45). The works in the Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable conflate history with Greek mythology and build upon Hirst’s long-standing investigation into the Victorian fascination with the natural world and a reverence for the spectacle of nature and the unpredictability of scientific specimen. Here, the scientific and the mythological collide in a marvelous, unexpected juxtapositioning that would become a hallmark of the show.

THE PRESENT WORK INSTALLED AT VENICE, PUNTA DELLA DOGANA, TREASURES FROM THE WRECKS OF THE UNBELIEVABLE.

Skull of a Unicorn marries the mythological symbol of the unicorn with the scientific specimen of the horse’s skull, the latter of which anchors the present work firmly within the realm of reality. A key work in the extraordinary spectacle that was the Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable exhibition, and an emblem of death and demise, Skull of a Unicorn confronts us with the stark binary between reality and illusion, science and myth, past and present.

Grecian Nude, 2013

Sotheby’s London: 28 June 2023
Estimated: GBP 400,000 – 600,000
GBP 508,000 / USD 606,494

Grecian Nude | Modern & Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Grecian Nude, 2013
Bronze
76 1/4 x 25 5/8 x 19 1/8 inches (193.8 x 65 x 48.5 cm)
Incised with the artist’s signature, dated 2013
Stamped with the foundry and Treasures stamps and numbered 1/3
This work is number 1 from an edition of 3, plus 2 artist’s proofs

Grecian Nude hails from Hirst’s exceptional ‘found treasures’ which formed the artist’s monumental and most ambitious recent exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable which took place at Punta della Dogana in 2017. The sculptures are accompanied by an elaborate but completely fictional backstory, according to which, the works were included in the cargo of a ship called Unbelievable (Apistos in Greek), which sank just off the coast of East Africa. The story claims that the works were recovered in 2008 through an archaeology venture funded by Hirst. The Venice exhibition showed a number of the ‘recovered’ sculptures prior to their ‘restoration’, showing the works heavily encrusted in corals and other marine life, at times rendering their forms essentially unrecognizable. The sculptures were presented alongside copies of museum artifacts, contextualising the group further.

Throughout the exhibition, Hirst presented different examples of the nude torso, all characterized by diminutive waists, accentuated hips, small high breasts and narrow, arched backs. This choice of motif is symptomatic of the classical predilection for forms that lent themselves to seriality, a trend that heavily contradicts the modern fetishization of the original. Since Marcel Duchamps’s first ‘readymades’ in the early 20th Century, artists have frequently confronted the question of the replica. Grecian Nude – a masterful copy of a Greek statue which perhaps never existed in the first place, sits within this same narrative, which artists including Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons had perpetuated. The Treasures project as a whole engages with the issues around authenticity; as noted in the exhibition guide, Cif Amotan II’s collection of artifacts consisted of ‘copies, fakes, purchases and plunders’ (exhibition guide for Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, Venice, Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana, 2017, p. 3).

VENUS DE MILO // LOUVRE, PARIS

The present work, alongside the other Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, echoes the themes explored by Damien Hirst throughout his career. In particular, the idea of belief and truth are at the core of his preoccupations: by questioning the central social systems we employ to interpret reality, he heartens a reflection on mythology, history and science. The indistinct confines between fact and fiction and between past and present a substantial challenge to our beliefs and moral principles.

Aten, 2015

Christie’s London: 28 June 2022
Estimated: GBP 1,000,000 – 1,500,000
GBP 1,242,000 / USD 1,515,928

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Aten, 2015
Red marble, grey agate and gold leaf
50 1/8 x 25 3/8 x 25 3/4 inches (127.3 x 64.5 x 65.5 cm)
Incised with the artist’s signature, numbered and dated ‘Damien Hirst 3/3 MMXV TT62-3’ (on the underside)
This work is number three from an edition of three plus two artist’s proofs

An extraordinary meditation on art, myth and humanity, Aten (2015) is a definitive work from Damien Hirst’s celebrated project Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable. Named after the ancient Egyptian sun god Aten, its lustrous marble and gold surface is carved in the likeness of twenty-first-century icon Rihanna, her intricate tattoo of the goddess Isis on her chest. The work bears witness to one of Hirst’s most ambitious technical and conceptual artistic undertakings. In 2017, the Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana in Venice were transformed into vast spectacles of wonder, filled with glistening artefacts supposedly excavated from the depths of the Indian Ocean after more than two thousand years. The hoard, Hirst’s story told, had once belonged to the legendary collector Cif Amotan II, whose precious cargo was shipwrecked near the ancient trading port of Azania. Blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, the exhibition raised pertinent questions about where we place our faith, suggesting that any encounter with art demands a certain suspension of belief. Seamlessly fusing past and present, Aten forces us to confront this question head on, impelling us to submit to its illusion.

From pristine simulations of weathered coral, to the accompanying Netflix documentary detailing the excavation, the exhibition’s magic was wholly conceived. The present work’s physical appearance is as immaculate as it is virtuosic, with traces of barnacles and sea creatures replicated with the same precision and detail as Rihanna’s distinctive body art. At the back of the catalogue, historical notes purported to shed light upon the objects’ origins and significance: ‘face upturned towards the sky’, the present work’s description ran, ‘this bust’s unusual pose likely relates to the dramatic monotheistic revolution initiated by the pharaoh Akhenaten in the fourteenth century BCE. Akhenaten discarded the vast pantheon of Egyptian gods in favour of a single solar entity: “Aten”, the life-giver. The subject of veneration was thus no longer found within man-made shrines, but in the sky above’ (Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, exh. cat. Palazzo Grassi and Punta Della Dogana, Venice 2017, p. 328). Rihanna, notably, released her single ‘Towards the Sun’ in the year of the present work.

Aten is particularly notable for its conflation of real and mythic figures. The catalogue note’s story of Aten and Akhenaten appeals to ancient Egyptian legend and history in equal measure. Rihanna’s image, meanwhile, is deeply engrained in contemporary popular culture: Hirst, significantly, had previously styled her as Medusa for his 2013 cover shoot for GQ. Other likenesses—from Pharrell Williams and Mickey Mouse to Transformers—featured in the exhibition, similarly recast as icons from the past. In yoking together radically different time frames, Hirst asks at what point fact slips into fantasy. Aten, Akhenaten and Rihanna are all—in their own way—illusions, their images worshipped, their lives imagined and their truths only half known. In the same vein, one might just as easily entertain the tale of Amotan, a former slave from Antioch who, between the mid-first and early-second centuries CE, built a fortune large enough to acquire an incomparable collection. Only the keenest observers would note that ‘Cif Amotan II’ was an anagram of ‘I am a fiction’; the name of the ill-fated ship, moreover—Apistos—translated to ‘unbelievable’ in Koine Greek.

The Warrior and the Bear, 2015

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2021
Estimated: USD 3,000,000 – 5,000,000
USD 3,450,000

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
The Warrior and the Bear, 2015
Bronze
280x102x80 inches (713x260x203 cm)
Engraved with the artist’s signature, number and date ‘D. Hirst 3/3 MMXV’
Stamped with the artist and foundry stamps (on the bear’s proper right foot)
This work is number three from an edition of three plus two artist’s proofs

A monumental apparition towering over twenty-three feet in height, The Warrior and the Bear is an extraordinary tour de force from Damien Hirst’s landmark 2017 exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable. Greeting visitors in the very first room at the Punta della Dogana in Venice, its vast, glistening coral-covered surface set the tone for what was widely hailed as the artist’s most ambitious undertaking to date. The exhibition posed as a triumphant unveiling of buried treasure—once owned by the legendary collector Cif Amotan II—whose hoard of artefacts had supposedly been shipwrecked off the coast of East Africa. Excavated from the depths of the Indian Ocean, so the story told, the vessel’s ill-fated cargo now appeared before the public after more than two thousand years. Conjuring the Greek maturation ritual of arkteia—in which young girls would imitate female bears as part of a sacrificial dance—the present work confronts the viewer like an ancient, totemic wonder, its lustrous bronze surface seemingly rescued from the ravages of time. Blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, it speaks to the central theme of Hirst’s practice: that all encounters with art demand a leap of faith, and a momentary suspension of belief.

Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable was all-consuming in its scope. The fable of Cif Amotan II—an anagram for “I am a fiction”—was as elaborate as it was remarkable. As the exhibition guide explained, Amotan was a former slave from Antioch who lived between the mid-first and early-second centuries CE. After obtaining freedom, he built a large fortune that led him to acquire a veritable treasure trove of artefacts. The collection had been destined for a purpose-built temple aboard the gigantic ship Apistos (“unbelievable” in Koine Greek) when fate intervened, leaving the hoard to flounder at the bottom of the ocean. In 2008, the story continued, the wreck was discovered near the ancient trading port of Azania, as relayed in the feature-length Netflix documentary produced in conjunction with the exhibition. The show’s narrative, however, deliberately muddied questions of authenticity from the very start, explaining that Amotan’s collection of “commissions, copies, fakes, purchases and plunders”—some of which were awaiting restoration—were displayed alongside “a series of contemporary museum copies” (Exhibition guide for Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, Punta della Dogana, Venice, 2017, p. 3). Such rhetoric captured the very essence of the project, forcing the viewer to question where myth ends and art begins.

Ideas about belief—and its relationship to art—have long guided Hirst’s practice. Working in the legacy of artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons, he is fascinated by the systems in which we choose to place our faith. This conceptual focus is borne out in his navigation of fields such as science, nature, religion and history, using art as a means of throwing their truth claims into relief. His early use of live insects in works such as A Thousand Years (1990) showed that life and death were as fleeting as pen and paper. His celebrated medicine cabinets, meanwhile, suggested that the miracles of science were no less worthy than those of art. The present work might be seen in particular relation to his formaldehyde tanks, in which Hirst sought to artificially arrest the process of organic decay. Here, the pristine simulation of barnacles and coral seems to perform this process in reverse, consciously emulating the effects of corrosion. From the viewer’s perspective, however, the visual impact is the same: in both, art seemingly triumphs over nature, halting the march of time and forcing us into a state of disbelief.

Penitent, 2011

Christie’s London: 23 March 2021
Estimated: GBP 350,000 – 450,000
GBP 437,500 / USD 603,448

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Penitent, 2011
Silver, paint
14 3/8 x 9 3/8 x 9 5/8 inches (36.5 x 23.9 x 24.6 cm)
Signed, numbered and dated ‘D. Hirst 3/3 MMXI’ (to the underside)
This work is number three from an edition of three plus two artist’s proofs

Confronting the viewer like a lost relic, Penitent belongs to an edition that formed part of Damien Hirst’s celebrated 2017 exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable. Held at the Palazzo Grassi and the Punta della Dogana in Venice, this extraordinary show was a technical and conceptual tour de force, drawing together the artist’s central themes of faith, humanity and the nature of art. Vast in both scale and ambition, the exhibition presented itself as a grand unveiling of buried treasure, purportedly rescued from the depths of the Indian Ocean after two thousand years. The hoard, it claimed, had belonged to the legendary Cif Amotan II—a freed slave from Antioch—whose lavish trove of artefacts had been shipwrecked off the coast of East Africa. Resembling an ancient bust or mask, exquisitely covered with intricately-wrought layers of coral and barnacles, Penitent was one of a number of works which—according to the story—were still awaiting restoration. By inviting the viewer to submit themselves to the tale of Amotan, Hirst drew attention to the act of belief that accompanies all our encounters with visual objects. Art and myth, he proposed, are two sides of the same coin.

Penitent operates in the conceptual legacy of Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and other artists who have explored the power of the simulacrum. The sheer depth of the exhibition’s scope, however, far outstripped any historical precedent: from the detailed descriptions and narratives attached to each object, to the feature-length Netflix documentary that seemingly charted the process of the cargo’s excavation. Woven into the show’s fabric, nonetheless, were knowing hints of its own fantasy. Eagle-eyed observers would spot that ‘Cif Amotan II’ was an anagram for ‘I am a fiction’. Meanwhile, the name of the fabled ship —‘Apistos’—translates from Koine Greek as ‘unbelievable’. Hirst himself points out that the word itself carries two implications: implausible, and amazing. Whether or not Amotan ever existed is immaterial: the fact remains that, through art, Hirst was able to conjure a story that momentarily compelled its audience to lose themselves in its world. This conviction remains one of driving forces behind his practice: that art is no less true or meaningful than any other system—science, religion, history—through which we choose to interpret reality.

 

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Natural History

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Swimming Form in Endless Motion, 1993

Christie’s London: 1 March 2022
Estimated: GBP 1,400,000 – 1,800,000
GBP 1,722,000 / USD 2,293,248

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Swimming Form in Endless Motion, 1993
Acrylic, painted aluminum, shark and formaldehyde solution
36x144x72 inches (91 x 365.8 x 182 cm)

Acquired directly from the artist shortly after its creation and held in the same private collection since, Swimming Form in Endless Motion (1993) is a poetically beautiful sculpture by Damien Hirst. A rare early example from his ‘Science for All’ series, which features animals preserved in clear acrylic tanks, it restages what is perhaps the most iconic image of Hirst’s career, and the most infamous in British art history: the shark, first seen in The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991). Here, rather than a vast tiger shark, a smaller specimen is encased in a vitrine. Its transparent case perches on a white-painted aluminum railing, which forms an ellipse more than 3.5 metres wide. While it is perfectly still, the shark appears to be travelling in a perpetual, looping circuit. Its propulsive, streamlined natural form contrasts poignantly with the artificial geometries of acrylic and metal. Suspended between life and art, freedom and entrapment, it is emblematic of Hirst’s enduring themes: our reluctance to confront death, and the inexorable passage of time.

While Hirst’s sculptures owe a formal debt to Minimalism and Conceptual art, their inclusion of animal bodies lends his explorations of mortality a uniquely visceral charge. One of the artist’s earliest works featuring formaldehyde, Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same Direction for the Purpose of Understanding (Right) (1991), comprises thirty-eight different fish sourced from Billingsgate Market, London, each enclosed in its own vitrine. ‘The fish pieces came first’, Hirst said, ‘because you have to take them out of their element (the sea) and put them into formaldehyde. It preserves them in a very similar state to their natural one, only they’re dead. I used “swimming” in the title because they’re not’ (D. Hirst, quoted in I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, London 1997, p. 298). This same irony pervades the present work, which arrests the shark in a paradoxical state of suspended animation: it has the appearance of life, achieved only through the eternal stillness of death.

In his career-long focus on mortal themes, Hirst has often investigated religion, science and art as intersecting belief systems. Religion holds the promise of eternal life; science seeks to prolong and optimize our earthly existence; art can extend beyond the maker’s death, granting a certain form of immortality. The shark—enshrined like a relic, preserved through scientific methods, and staged in its theatrical transit through art—touches on all these ideas. Roberta Smith wrote of The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living that ‘the shark is simultaneously life and death incarnate in a way you don’t quite grasp until you see it, suspended and silent, in its tank. It gives the innately demonic urge to live a demonic, deathlike form’ (R. Smith, ‘Just When You Thought It Was Safe’, New York Times, 16 October 2007). Here, as the slender creature balances precariously on its beam, Hirst’s vision is one of fragile hope. With a striking economy of means, he probes some of the most profound, even romantic, mysteries available to art: how do we keep going in the knowledge of life’s inevitable end? Are we truly free, or does our fate run on fixed tracks towards its only certainty?

Ashtray Head/Fallen Empire, 1995

Christie’s London: 1 March 2022
Estimated: GBP 800,000 – 1,200,000
GBP 1,002,000 / USD 1,334,398

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965) (christies.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Ashtray Head/Fallen Empire, 1995
Fiberglass, cow’s head, blood and flies
26x96x96 inches (65 x 243.8 x 243.8 cm)
Executed in 1995

Created in 1995—the year of the artist’s victorious Turner Prize entry—Ashtray Head/Fallen Empire is an arresting and unmistakable large-scale sculpture by Damien Hirst. A gigantic ashtray, eight feet across and formed of white fibreglass, holds the head of a cow. Dark red blood, studded with flies, pools out over the pristine surface. In a body of work that confronts mortality head-on, both cow and ashtray have been central motifs for Hirst: from the iconic system of cow’s head, flies and Insect-O-Cutor in A Thousand Years (1990) and the bisected cow and calf of Mother and Child, Divided (1993)—a key part of his Turner Prize entry—to the eight-foot ashtray sculptures Horror at Home (1995) and Party Time (1995), which contain the remains of thousands of cigarettes smoked at the Groucho Club, his favourite Soho haunt. The present work uniquely combines these two emblems, creating a monumental vanitas of surreal and striking impact. It was acquired directly from the artist shortly after it was made, and has remained in the same private collection since.

Hirst’s works of the 1990s are among the most recognisable in modern art. They defined the era of the Young British Artists, sparking controversy and acclaim in equal measure, and have lost none of their unnerving power today. Their provocation lies partly in their unorthodox components, which, in Duchampian mode, overspill the margins between art and life. The artist has spoken of ‘always wanting things to be real and wanting people to feel like they were being presented with their own lives … I wanted people to think, “That shouldn’t be in an art gallery”, as well as questioning why they are in an art gallery’ (D. Hirst, quoted in ‘Like People, Life Flies: Damien Hirst interviewed by Mirta d’Argenzio’, in Damien Hirst: The Agony and The Ecstasy: Selected Works from 1989-2004, exh. cat. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples 2004, p. 118). Beyond their initial shock value, however, his sculptures are made potent by an extraordinary formal rigour. In Ashtray Head/Fallen Empire, the ashtray’s whiteness—its seamless finish worthy of the Minimalist structures of Sol Lewitt or Donald Judd—heightens the visceral presence of the head within. As with the sterile, hard-edged vitrines of A Thousand Years and Hirst’s ‘Natural History’ formaldehyde works, this vivid contrast speaks to a hopeless human impulse to contain, deny or sanitise the idea of death. The body erupts violently and creatively from amid these stark, ordered frameworks, like the fleshy convulsions of a Francis Bacon painting: in the present work, the slick of blood is like paint splashed on a virgin canvas.

Cows, Hirst has observed, ‘are the most slaughtered animals ever … I see them as death objects’ (D. Hirst, quoted in S. Morgan, ‘An Interview with Damien Hirst’, in No Sense of Absolute Corruption, exh. cat. Gagosian Gallery, New York 1996, p. 18). His interest in smoking is similarly symbolic. Like candles in a memento mori still life, cigarettes are markers of the passage of time, their burning down analogous to the slow extinguishing of a human lifespan. Hirst, however, finds a paradoxical splendour in the agency of smoking. ‘I went to some posh person’s house and they had a tiny little fucking ashtray, it was about two inches by one inch’, he said in 1995. ‘And they had a beautiful house. It’s like they were trying to reduce the horror to such a point. You could only fit about three cigarette butts in it, then they’d empty it … The whole thing in life is you don’t know when you’re going to die. It makes everything not make sense, there’s this unknown factor. Whereas if you suddenly go, “OK, I choose to die now”, you take the matter into your own hands. So smoking is the perfect way to commit suicide without actually dying’ (D. Hirst, quoted in A. Graham-Dixon, ‘In the Picture: Horror at Home, by Damien Hirst’, The Sunday Telegraph, 31 December 2000). The present work seems to visualise this contradiction, and in its monumental scale becomes a riveting piece of theatre. Rather than shrinking from mortality, Hirst invites the viewer to confront it as part of life: his ashtray is an arena large enough to dive into, like a bullring or colosseum, with death a stubbed-out offering at its centre.

The Incredible Journey, 2008

Sotheby’s London: 25 March 2021
Estimated: GBP 700,000 – 900,000
GBP 570,000 / USD 782,000

The Incredible Journey | 《奇妙旅程》 | Modern Renaissance: A Cross-Category Sale | 2021 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b.1965)
The Incredible Journey, 2008
Glass, painted stainless steel, silicone, monofilament, stainless steel, zebra and formaldehyde solutio
82 1/8 x 127 x 42 3/4 inches (208.6 x 322.5 x 108.8 cm)

First presented as a stand-out work in Damien Hirst’s landmark auction event at Sotheby’s, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever in 2008, The Incredible Journey is a striking example from the artist’s iconic Natural History series. Infamous as the ‘zoo of dead animals’, this series encompasses an ambitious cross-section of specimens from the natural world, from cows (Some Comfort Gained from the Inherent Lies in Everything, 1996), to preserved lambs (Away from the Flock 1994), to pickled sharks (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living 1991), these works represent the most spectacular and idiosyncratic of Hirst’s career. Industrially encased in the thick frame-like white parameters of Hirst’s signature glass tank, The Incredible Journey exhibits the preserved beauty of one of the most visually striking species to walk planet Earth. With the cool detachment of a scientific specimen, Hirst’s perfectly preserved and minimalist Zebra is an extraordinary expression of the artist’s abiding obsession with death, science and religion.

If death is the supreme arbiter of Hirst’s artistic production, then science, religion and art represent the holy trinity. The extraordinary confluence of Hirst’s Catholic up-bringing and weekends spent working at a local mortuary have undoubtedly channelled an idiosyncratic visual double-speak that unites the polarity of religion and science to forge some of Hirst’s most challenging and iconographically rich works to date.

Within the Natural History cycle, Hirst’s empirical impetus to “understand the world by taking things out of the world… you kill things to look at them” is coupled with familiar Christian fables (D. Hirst, I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, London 1997, p. 7). Designated titles with a distinctly Biblical timbre, Hirst’s specimens instantly remind us of our own corporeality as well as the promise of immortality proposed by religion and science. Recalling Roman Catholic transubstantiation, the miraculous transformation of the Eucharistic wine and bread into the physical body of Christ, Hirst requires physical authenticity for his work: “I couldn’t say what I wanted with a painting or with a photography of an object. I wanted the real thing” (Ibid., p. 299). Ultimately, death triumphs, yet both science and religion ostensibly stake discordant claims to a promise of eternal life within Hirst’s corpus of life-like yet embalmed post-mortem creatures. Submerged in formaldehyde, The Incredible Journey is suspended in a chemical utopia that breaks the screen between life and death. Frozen in the purgatorial space between the moment of expiration and utter oblivion, flesh and tissue are unnaturally fixed, and life and death are congealed in stasis. Prohibited from natural decomposition, Hirst’s preserved Zebra appears baptised by full immersion in the toxic aqua vitae of formaldehyde; a substance the allows Hirst to stage an ersatz life, as though in suspended animation. Though any trace of decay is absent, formaldehyde solution is far from infallible – it needs to be replaced over time. Hirst’s momento mori thus declares resistance to death and decay as ultimately futile: nothing can prevent entropy and the inevitability of disintegration; in the end we are mere biology.

Within Hirst’s Natural History the fragility and transience of life is made into a spectacle. The steel and glass vitrines themselves stemmed from this “fear of everything in life being so fragile”; Hirst elaborated, “I wanted to make a sculpture where the fragility was encased. Where it exists in its own space” (Ibid., p. 9). The iconic thick white encasings provide a hermetically sealed three-dimensional frame by which Hirst safely delineates and contains his subject. Aesthetically slick and clinically immaculate, these clear-cut forms transpose the minimalist formality of Donald Judd and Sol Lewitt, whilst evoking the existential space-frames of Hirst’s greatest acknowledged influence, Francis Bacon. With The Incredible Journey and the extraordinary Natural History corpus, Hirst engenders a new realism; utterly concrete, physical and direct, these works powerfully confront, not with an obvious representation or illusion, but with reality, to remind us of the impermanence of our own physical machinery. In Hirst’s own words: “I want to give you the energy to go away and think about your life again” (D. Hirst quoted in: Exh. Cat., Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, op. cit., p. 236).

 

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Other Series

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Forget, 2003

Sotheby’s London: 26 June 2024
Estimated: GBP 150,000 – 200,000
GBP 156,000 / USD 197,808

https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2024/contemporary-art-day-auction-including-the-ralph-i-goldenberg-collection/forget

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Forget, 2003
Household gloss on canvas with gold leaf
80 1/2 x 99 inches (204.5 x 251.4 cm (1 inch spot)

Resplendent with minimalist white gloss spots that subtly emanate from the matte background delightfully highlighted by the gold leaf enshrouded edges, Forget radiates with otherworldly splendor. Truly unique within Damien Hirst’s celebrated oeuvre, this mesmerizingly sublime composition was executed in 2003 on the occasion of the artist’s famous Romance in the Age of Uncertainty exhibition. Originally presented alongside its sister painting, Forgive, the iconic duo offered a safe haven for self-reflection and confession within Hirst’s solo exhibition which explored “the confusing relations between love, life and death; and the tension between flesh and spirit, individual and group, loyalty and betrayal.” Within this context, Forget and Forgive provided a visual contrast to the Butterfly Paintings and Medicine Cabinets. While the latter works promised “paradise as the cessation of pain”, Forget and Forgive served as a quiet oasis – a calm space to pause, ponder, confess, forgive and forget. The juxtaposition of these elements highlights Hirst’s exploration of the human condition, and the complex interplay between pain and peace, chaos and calm.

“I remember I was thinking that there were four important things in life: religion, love, art and science. At their best, they’re all just tools to help you find a path through the darkness.”

INSTALLATION VIEW OF THE PRESENT WORK AT ROMANCE IN THE AGE OF UNCERTAINTY, WHITE CUBE, LONDON, 2003
ARTWORK: © DAMIEN HIRST AND SCIENCE LTD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, DACS 2024

Science, identified by Hirst as the defining belief-system of our contemporary age, occupies a position of authority rivalling that of religion. By infusing art with the clinical sterility and semiotic assurance of pharmaceutical products, Hirst substitutes religion’s role in providing reassurance of an afterlife with the empirically confident aesthetic and clinical placation of pharmacology. Uniquely, Forget synthesizes these two important preoccupations in Hirst’s practice: the spiritual and religious allusions of its composition, and the repetitive rigor and minimalist formal attributes reflecting scientific precision.

The ethereal Forget ultimately generates an almost meditative experience, creating an atmosphere of elemental simplicity. The work’s serene luminosity invites viewers into a contemplative state, evoking a sense of tranquility and introspection. It reveals the uncertainty at the core of human existence posing philosophical questions about the nature of the human experience while providing a space for each viewer to find their own answers. This contemplative state is reminiscent of the one experienced when looking at Old Master altarpieces, a link that is further strengthened through the artist’s integration of golf leaf. The interplay of light and shadow, the delicate balance of the gilt edges, and the minimalist white gloss spots contribute to an overall aesthetic that is both striking and soothing. Forget is not merely a visual piece but a profound statement on the intersection of science, religion, and human emotion. Through the present work, Hirst offers a contemplative space that encourages viewers to explore their own thoughts and feelings, ultimately fostering a deeper understanding of their place in the world.

Beijing, 2014

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 28 May 2024
Estimated: HKD 2,500,000 – 3,500,000
HKD 3,024,000 / USD 387,350

https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6486635

DAMIEN HIRST (B. 1965)
Beijing, 2014
Scalpel blades, skin graft blades, razor blades, zips, pins, safety pins and gloss paint on canvas
72 x 107 7/8 inches (182.9 x 274 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Damien Hirst Beijing 2014’ (on the reverse)

Spanning across nearly nine feet wide, Damien Hirst’s Beijing is at once monumental and strikingly captivating. It is one of the seventeen paintings Hirst created for his limited Black Scalpel Cityscapes series between 2013 and 2014. Using surgical instruments rather than his trademark living materials like butterflies, insects, and sharks, the painting depicts cities that are either undergoing conflicts or are epicenters of political, religious, and economic significance in a composition of a bird’s-eye view that brings to mind virtual data like Google Earth and its association with the inevitable surveillance aspect of modern life. Setting against the black background, Hirst maps out the cityscape of Beijing—the capital of China where the Imperial Palace and Tiananmen Square are located. It is also the largest city among the four that the artist chose from Asia for this series. In particular, the historical site, formerly named ‘The Forbidden City’ and consisting of 980 surviving buildings, is captured at the bottom left of the present work. In his own manner of ‘surgical mapping’, Hirst uses countless scalpels, razor blades, hooks, iron filings, and safety pins to meticulously trace the urban contours and delineate both manmade features and natural elements. For Hirst, landscape is no less than a different type of body that one would want to represent and possess ‘“universal trigger” that inspires profound and ambivalent emotion in people regardless of place, race, gender, class, and history’.  In Beijing, the vessels and routes of the modern metropolis are not unlike veins in plants and human bodies, stretched out in front of the vigilant, clinical eye of the artist—an artistic inquiry that threads through Hirst’s oeuvre over the past three decades.

Similar to Hirst’s celebrated series, including Spot Paintings, Entomology Cabinets, or Kaleidoscope Paintings, the present work bears witness to Hirst’s emblematic technique of systematic repetition and obsessive patterning—a reminder that order and control are abstract ideas that remain unattainable in real life. Steel scalpels, as a subject or tool that has recurred in Hirst’s works since the early 1990s, was, in the artist’s words, ‘dark but at the same time light’ for its highly reflective property as a precision-tooled metal, as well as its evocative of the universal fear of the surgeon’s knife. Likewise, Hirst’s scalpel cityscapes series manipulates the wordplay around ‘surgical strike’, a military procedure that widely uses modern warfare that carefully targets precise areas for eradication, to explore not only personal anxiety towards mortality but also the automation of warfare and perhaps the feeling of a distant Orwellian system that imposes itself on all of us.

 

 

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Damien Hirst Prints & Multiples

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WORK IN PROGRESS

 

PLEASE CLICK BELOW FOR SOME PRINTS HIGHLIGHTS

Damien Hirst Prints Highlights

 

Day in Day Out, 2003

Phillips London: 25 October 2024
Estimated: GBP 20,000 – 30,000
GBP 177,800 / USD 230,985

Damien Hirst – Damien Hirst: Online … Lot 42 October 2024 | Phillips

Damien Hirst’s pill cabinets, such as End of Days, epitomize his enduring fascination with the intersection of medicine, mortality, and belief systems. For Hirst, pharmaceuticals are emblematic of our modern search for salvation – science’s attempt to replace religion as the answer to life’s most existential questions. Each pill, meticulously arranged within its cabinet, is a reminder of our dependence on these tiny, synthetic symbols of healing and control. Inspired by his own childhood experiences – Hirst’s mother worked for a pharmaceutical company – he began creating the pill cabinets in the early 1990s, translating the cold sterility of the pharmacy into the realm of contemporary art. His works convey a stark duality: pills are both promises of health and poignant symbols of death, epitomising humanity’s fraught relationship with the promise of immortality. This thematic obsession was extended to his Pharmacy restaurants (Notting Hill, London, 1998-2003, and Vauxhall, London, 2016–18), where pill motifs adorned the interior, blurring the line between art, medicine, and consumerism.

“There are four important things in life: religion, love, art and science. At their best, they’re all just tools to help you find a path through the darkness. None of them really work that well, but they help. Of all of them, science seems to be the one right now. Like religion, it provides the glimmer of hope that maybe it will be all right in the end.”

Formally, the pill cabinets share a minimalist aesthetic that connects them to Hirst’s spot paintings, both series relying on repetition and color to mesmerize and provoke. However, where the spot paintings offer a dizzying, abstract array of colored dots with no discernible content, the pill cabinets give each object an explicit function, grounding the viewer in the language of pharmaceuticals. These arrangements of vividly colored pills resemble candy-like ornaments, yet their medicinal potency underscores their darker subtext – life, death, and the illusion of control. Hirst’s pills act as a modern iconography, where medicine replaces the traditional icons of faith, alluding to a contemporary, secular belief in the omnipotence of science. In this body of work, Hirst raises provocative questions about our reliance on pharmaceuticals, suggesting that in contemporary society’s quest for meaning and control, science has taken on a quasi-religious role.

End of Days, 2003

Phillips London: 25 October 2024
Estimated: GBP 20,000 – 30,000
GBP 127,000 / USD 164,990

Damien Hirst – Damien Hirst: Online … Lot 41 October 2024 | Phillips

Damien Hirst’s pill cabinets, such as End of Days, epitomise his enduring fascination with the intersection of medicine, mortality, and belief systems. For Hirst, pharmaceuticals are emblematic of our modern search for salvation – science’s attempt to replace religion as the answer to life’s most existential questions. Each pill, meticulously arranged within its cabinet, is a reminder of our dependence on these tiny, synthetic symbols of healing and control. Inspired by his own childhood experiences – Hirst’s mother worked for a pharmaceutical company – he began creating the pill cabinets in the early 1990s, translating the cold sterility of the pharmacy into the realm of contemporary art. His works convey a stark duality: pills are both promises of health and poignant symbols of death, epitomising humanity’s fraught relationship with the promise of immortality. This thematic obsession was extended to his Pharmacy restaurants (Notting Hill, London, 1998-2003, and Vauxhall, London, 2016–18), where pill motifs adorned the interior, blurring the line between art, medicine, and consumerism.

“Pills are hope. Pills can kill.”

Formally, the pill cabinets share a minimalist aesthetic that connects them to Hirst’s spot paintings, both series relying on repetition and color to mesmerize and provoke. However, where the spot paintings offer a dizzying, abstract array of colored dots with no discernible content, the pill cabinets give each object an explicit function, grounding the viewer in the language of pharmaceuticals. These arrangements of vividly colored pills resemble candy-like ornaments, yet their medicinal potency underscores their darker subtext – life, death, and the illusion of control. Hirst’s pills act as a modern iconography, where medicine replaces the traditional icons of faith, alluding to a contemporary, secular belief in the omnipotence of science. In this body of work, Hirst raises provocative questions about our reliance on pharmaceuticals, suggesting that in contemporary society’s quest for meaning and control, science has taken on a quasi-religious role.