View "SPOTS" by Damien Hirst

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Galerie Maximillian has an extensive collection of original works on paper by Damien Hirst.  Please VIEW ALL WORK to see the largest collection of Hirst prints and graphics available in the U.S.

Damien Hirst is one of the most important and provocative British artists working today.  His monumental works of art have been exhibited in prestigious galleries and museums worldwide. 

His preoccupation with life, death, meaningful living, belonging, alienation and the passage of time – have been his artistic obsession for the past 15 years.  Throughout his career, his work has challenged the boundaries between art, science, religion, the media and popular culture.   

Damien Hirst

The Last Supper

Screenprint, 1999

59 1/2 x 40 inches

Signed, edition 150

Steak and Kidney is based on a pack of Ethambutol Hydrochloride (400mg tablets).  Hirst has excised the POM symbol (standing for 'Prescription only Medicine', and only legally supplied by a pharmacist on receipt of a doctor's prescription) and replaced it with PIE.  The medicine is used in the treatment of tuberculosis.  Side effects include a unique type of visual impairment with is usually reversible on cessation of therapy.  The box which Hirst based his design upon is no longer in circulation.

THE LAST SUPPER

The abiding theme in Hirst's work is the interface between life and death.  Some of his works feature dead animals preserved in fluids while others feature surgical equipment, skeletons, anatomical models, dead butterflies and cigarette butts.  In 1989 Hirst made the first in a series of medicine cabinets containing bottles and drug packets.  These cabinets, with their neatly stacked pharmaceutical products, highlight our obsession with drugs, which seem to have replaced God in modern mythology.  Attractively packaged but potentially lethel, drugs have the power to kill and cure, to make us happy or sad.  In Hirst's oeuvre, the drug packet stands as a metaphor for the balance between life, death, desire and consumerism.

In 1992 Hirst created a whole Pharmacy in an art gallery.  Questioned about the work he remarked "What was Pharmacy about?  Confidence that drugs will cure everything.  It's like a readymade.  Put one on the wall and it looks confident.  I went to the chemist's and thought "I wish I could make art like that", then realized I could have it as it was.

Apart from their direct connotations with life and death, Hirst has associated drugs with food.  Like food, drugs are normally taken orally and at refular intervals, perhaps twice a day, like lunch and dinner.  Drugs have become common supplements and even replacements for food.

Referencing the Bible, there are thirteen screenprints in the Last Supper series.  The prints are based on specific pharmaceutical packets.  The manufacturers' logos and trademarks have been changed for Hirst's own name and variant logos, in an apparent allusion to the artist's own status as a global, marketable product.  The drug names have been displaced by the names of humble foods that might be found in any corner cafe in Britain. 

Some of Hirst's medicine cabinets employ drug packets in a narrative, hierarchical fashion, with headache pills on the top row, treatments for footsores at the bottom, and medicines for various other ailments in between.  The chosen foods in the Last Supper series do not however have any specific correlation with the particular drug packets which they imitate, and the packets were chosen for their designs rather than for the specific properties of each drug.