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Lot Essay
A majestic early ‘Kaleidoscope’ painting by Damien Hirst, The Wonder of You (2002) creates a vortex of shimmering, radial beauty from the wings of thousands of butterflies. Across a canvas more than two metres wide, the wings – flashing from iridescent blue to pale yellow through an array of rich, variegated patterns – are set like jewels in pale pink gloss paint. Fixed in a symmetrical, centrifugal configuration, they echo the form of a stained-glass window. The work stems from Hirst’s earliest series of ‘Kaleidoscope’ paintings, which were inspired by a Victorian tea tray made of butterfly wings trapped beneath glass. While he already had been using butterflies in his art for a decade, Hirst went further with this series to explore their spiritual symbolism. In Christian imagery they signify the resurrection, and in Greek antiquity butterfly wings were an attribute of Psyche, the soul. Where he had previously worked with live butterflies, or interred entire dead butterflies in paint, in these new works Hirst used only the insects’ wings: recalling a friend saying that ‘Butterflies are beautiful, but it’s a shame they have disgusting hairy bodies in the middle’, he divorced the wings from ‘the real thing’ to express a vision of rarefied, idealised beauty (D. Hirst, quoted in I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, rev. ed., London 2005, p. 135).
In The Wonder of You, Hirst separates some pairs of wings to a great distance within the work’s mirroring scheme, foregrounding their natural symmetry. In their intricate, mandala-like arrangement, they call to mind not only the iconography of religious worship but also the deep geometries that structure the world we live in. The work’s title heightens its sense of communion with the sublime. Hirst conjures glory from death, transforming the short-lived, transient insects into a spectacle of eternal and awe-inspiring splendour.
Works like The Wonder of You represent the culmination of a journey that began in 1991 with In and Out of Love, Hirst’s legendary installation that filled the gallery space with live butterflies. As the artist recalls, ‘I had white paintings with shelves on and the paintings had live pupae for butterflies glued on them. The pupae hatched from the paintings and flew around, so it was like an environment for butterflies … Then downstairs I had another table which had ashtrays on it and canvases with dead butterflies stuck in the paint. There were four boxes with holes in … which were supposed to look like boxes that the butterflies came from there and died in the paint’ (D. Hirst, quoted in Damien Hirst: The Agony and the Ecstasy, exh. cat. Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples 2004, pp. 74-77). Reflecting Hirst’s darkly comedic sensibility, a later series of monochrome butterfly paintings grew from this vision of insects trapped in wet pigment. ‘I [wanted] it to look like an artist’s studio where he had had coloured canvases wet and the butterflies had landed in them,’ Hirst explains. ‘I remember painting something white once and flies landing on it, thinking “Fuck!” but then thinking it was funny … The death of an insect that still has this really optimistic beauty of a wonderful thing’ (D. Hirst, quoted in ibid., p. 83). Taking lessons from the realms of religion, art and science, The Wonder of You sees an evolution of these ideas, bringing the butterflies’ ‘optimistic beauty’ to dazzling new heights. Like a cathedral window, the work seems to let in light; it is as if Hirst has shattered a lepidopterist’s cabinet, creating in its place a holy mosaic that offers a new mode of belief in the grandeurs of life and death.
In The Wonder of You, Hirst separates some pairs of wings to a great distance within the work’s mirroring scheme, foregrounding their natural symmetry. In their intricate, mandala-like arrangement, they call to mind not only the iconography of religious worship but also the deep geometries that structure the world we live in. The work’s title heightens its sense of communion with the sublime. Hirst conjures glory from death, transforming the short-lived, transient insects into a spectacle of eternal and awe-inspiring splendour.
Works like The Wonder of You represent the culmination of a journey that began in 1991 with In and Out of Love, Hirst’s legendary installation that filled the gallery space with live butterflies. As the artist recalls, ‘I had white paintings with shelves on and the paintings had live pupae for butterflies glued on them. The pupae hatched from the paintings and flew around, so it was like an environment for butterflies … Then downstairs I had another table which had ashtrays on it and canvases with dead butterflies stuck in the paint. There were four boxes with holes in … which were supposed to look like boxes that the butterflies came from there and died in the paint’ (D. Hirst, quoted in Damien Hirst: The Agony and the Ecstasy, exh. cat. Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples 2004, pp. 74-77). Reflecting Hirst’s darkly comedic sensibility, a later series of monochrome butterfly paintings grew from this vision of insects trapped in wet pigment. ‘I [wanted] it to look like an artist’s studio where he had had coloured canvases wet and the butterflies had landed in them,’ Hirst explains. ‘I remember painting something white once and flies landing on it, thinking “Fuck!” but then thinking it was funny … The death of an insect that still has this really optimistic beauty of a wonderful thing’ (D. Hirst, quoted in ibid., p. 83). Taking lessons from the realms of religion, art and science, The Wonder of You sees an evolution of these ideas, bringing the butterflies’ ‘optimistic beauty’ to dazzling new heights. Like a cathedral window, the work seems to let in light; it is as if Hirst has shattered a lepidopterist’s cabinet, creating in its place a holy mosaic that offers a new mode of belief in the grandeurs of life and death.