Damien Hirst Memento For Sale

Memento is a portfolio of thirteen photogravure etchings created by the artist in 2008. The series features Hirst’s most quintessential icons: skulls and butterflies. Amongst six butterflies and seven skulls, the portfolio’s subject matter draws from the art historical genre of Memento Mori (‘remember you must die’), paintings that serve as a reminder of one’s mortality and often feature skulls alongside other symbols of fragility such as flowers.  

Through the medium of reproductive etching rather than painting, Hirst creates a modern memento mori through both the animal and human symbols of the butterfly and skull. In the first half of the portfolio, butterflies, though luminously coloured, lack the vitality expressed in their beauty: they are specimens, devoid of movement. The following skulls, emerging from the dark background in various states, are perhaps a more harrowing representation of death and decay. Hirst forces us to face the human condition in its most raw form, and as put in his own words: ‘Death is every artist’s main theme. It just depends how far you stand back from it’.  

When viewed in its entirety, the portfolio’s butterflies and skulls are not only counterparts to each other, but examine two principle motifs across decades of the artist’s career. Having taken an avid interest in the interrelationship of science and art, his butterflies and skulls are carefully studied, a quality mirrored in the seriality of the work. Each example in the suite delights in a different species of butterfly or depiction of the skull, a kind of forensic intensity that few artists could take on other than Hirst, who purchased the real human skull at a shop in Islington, London, seeking the most realistic and finely detailed representation. The seemingly dark sensibility that underpins Hirst’s work, is for him a necessary contradiction: “I’ve got an obsession with death.. But I think it’s like a celebration of life rather than something morbid.” Indeed the classical beauty of each butterfly or skull in the series – reminiscent of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painting, is a way of approaching a difficult theme through the panacea of artistic contemplation, which comforts and moves us. 

The last plate in the series stands out from the rest in its completely altered state: the whole of the skull, bedazzled, lurches sharply from the dark background. This plate is an etching of one of Hirst’s most famous and controversial works, the diamond-encrusted skull titled For the Love of God (2007). Comprised of over eight thousand real diamonds, and costing over £15 million to create, the art work was greatly debated by critics. Its inclusion in Memento points to Hirst’s distinctively modern, glamorous approach to death. For art historian Rudi Fuchs, the skull’s ostentatious qualities ‘proclaims victory over decay.’