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Damien Hirst

Utopia, 2008

Description

Maker

  • Damien Hirst, b. 1965, English

Title

Utopia

Year

2008

Medium

Butterflies and household gloss paint on paper

Materials/Techniques

Materials

  • paint

Supports

  • paper

Dimensions

Sheet: 136 x 134 cm (53 9/16 x 52 3/4 inches)

Signature / Inscription / Marks

Signed at lower left; titled in lower right

Type

  • Works on Paper,
  • Collage

Credit

Richard Brown Baker Fund for Contemporary British Art

Object Number

2009.12

Projects & Publications

Publications

Manual / Issue 4

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Read Online

Exhibition History

Exhibition History

Made in the UK

September 23, 2011 - January 8, 2012

A provocative artist associated with the YBAs (Young British Artists), Damien Hirst often employs unexpected materials that conflate art, science, and popular culture. The hundreds of butterflies mounted in paint in Utopia—with their intense colors and symmetrical, geometric composition—recall a mandala or kaleidoscope image. Butterflies are among Hirst’s most frequent motifs. With their delicacy and short life cycles, they are a metaphor for the fragility of existence that reflects the artist’s interest in fundamental questions about mortality.

Nature/Artifice

April 25, 2009 - February 28, 2010

Use

The images on this website can enable discovery and collaboration and support new scholarship, and we encourage their use. This object is in Copyright. This object is Utopia with the accession number of 2009.12. To request high-resolution files or new photography, please send an email to imagerequest@risd.edu and include your name and the object's accession number.

Feedback

We view our online collection as a living documents, and our records are frequently revised and enhanced. If you have additional information or have spotted an error, please send feedback to curatorial@risd.edu.

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