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.