Diamonds are about perfection and clarity and wealth and sex and death and immortality. They are a symbol of everything that’s eternal, but then they have a dark side as well.
—Damien Hirst
To inaugurate the Hong Kong exhibition space, Gagosian is pleased to present Forgotten Promises, an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Damien Hirst.
In recent years, Hirst has developed his familiar iconography—the skull, the diamond, and the butterfly—to explore fundamental ideas about existence. His work highlights the duality that lies at the heart of human experience, in our inexorable struggles between life and death, beauty and decay, desire and fear, love and loss.
While Hirst’s earlier Fact paintings focused on the brutality and violence of life using documentary images found in newspapers and magazines; or the beauty and agony of childbirth, taken from photographs of the birth of his own son; or the light-refracted brilliance of the world’s most famous diamonds, the new Butterfly Fact Paintings capture dramatic moments in the fleeting lives of different species of butterflies. For Hirst, the butterfly is a symbol of the beauty and fragility of life. Close-up images of butterflies, sourced from science libraries, are painted in oil with painstaking attention to realistic detail. “Why else would you do it, when you could just get a photograph that looks identical?” Hirst has said. “But it’s not the same thing, is it? A photograph is from a moment, a split second. Painting is about stopping to look at the world, considering it, and giving it more and more importance.”
