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Current Exhibitions
History
A leading figure of the provocative Young British Artists movement in the late 1980s and 1990s, Damien Hirst garnered international attention with his striking displays with the fleeting nature of life as a central theme. One of the most recognizable examples is The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), a 14-foot-long glass tank with a shark preserved in formaldehyde. Hirst continues the long tradition in art history of memento mori, a Latin phrase describing the symbolic reminder of death’s inevitability.
As part of this enquiry, one of Hirst’s most iconic series is his butterfly paintings, which includes this work, Overwhelming Love (2008). Hirst’s butterfly paintings speak to his characteristic themes, offering the contradiction of death with the bright vitality of a butterfly’s wings. There is a connection to the Dutch and Netherlandish Golden Age painters who included memento mori even amongst beautiful displays. Some like Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder even included butterflies with their complex and layered symbolism.
His first butterfly paintings, starting in 1991, consisted of painted canvases left in a room in which butterflies emerged from cocoons, flying and getting caught in the paint. Even the type of paint, a household gloss, is intentional so that, in the words of Hirst, it would “look like an accident of paint with butterflies stuck on it.” As the title of the work hints, there is the tension between life and death. We see the beauty of the butterfly – often a symbol for freedom, the human soul and even resurrection – caught in an apparent fatal accident, a dark splendor.
MoreMARKET INSIGHTS
- Hirst’s primary market famously outperforms his secondary market, meaning that private sales reach even greater heights than those recorded at auction.
- His famous 2008 Sotheby’s auction, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, fetched $200.75 million, marking the most expensive single-artist auction to date. More recently, sales from his 2017 Venice exhibition totaled $330 million.
- Overwhelming Love offers access to a highly desired blue-chip artist whose market continuously soars and breaks boundaries. In April of this year, The Art Newspaper remarked of his market, “his ubiquitous brand makes him a safer bet in uncertain times.” Source: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2021/04/13/in-our-current-dystopian-art-market-the-pervasive-and-persistent-damien-hirst-may-well-have-the-last-laugh
- Notorious for pushing the limits of artistic media, Hirst recently announced his first NFT drop, The Currency, which consists of 10,000 individually sold sheets with colorful dots, signatures, and numbers, and their owners must ultimately decide between the physical artwork or its corresponding NFT. The Currency now has a total market value of approximately $500 million USD.
Top Results at Auction
Comparable Paintings Sold at Auction
- Monumental painting, sold for over $9.6 million USD fourteen years ago
- From a few years earlier than our piece, which was created during the height of his market in the mid-2000s
- Similar to Overwhelming Love, this painting features real butterfly specimens affixed to the canvas and paint, a seminal series he began in the late 1980s
- Another monumental example of Hirst’s butterfly paintings, created in the same year as Overwhelming Love, sold for nearly $2.6 million USD in the same year it was painted
- Similar to our piece, this painting features flat planes of vibrant color, peppered with butterflies
- Similar in color and scale to Overwhelming Love
- Sold 17 years ago for $655,518, before Hirst’s market reached its zenith in the mid-2000s
- Comparable year, composition, and color, only slightly larger than Overwhelming Love
- Sold for over $535,000 at auction five years ago
Paintings in Museum Collections
Image Gallery
Additional Resources
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Other Works by Damien Hirst