Pharmaceuticals
Pharmaceuticals
Signed Print
Damien Hirst
£7,500-£11,000
$15,000-$22,000 Value Indicator
$14,000-$20,000 Value Indicator
¥70,000-¥100,000 Value Indicator
€8,500-€12,500 Value Indicator
$80,000-$110,000 Value Indicator
¥1,520,000-¥2,230,000 Value Indicator
$10,000-$14,500 Value Indicator
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127 x 103cm, Edition of 75, Digital Print
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Meaning & Analysis
Pharmaceuticals is an inkjet print from 2005 by Damien Hirst, published in an edition of 75. The print shows several rows of pills on display in a medical cabinet, rendered in saturated colours and in photographic detail. Using the medical pill as a central motif to this work, Hirst explores themes of life and death in contemporary society in this mixed media print.
As with many of Hirst’s most famous works, Pharmaceuticals foregrounds the artist’s preoccupation with the human condition. Disrupting any binary discussion of life and death through the ambivalent symbol of the medical pill, Hirst in this print brings sickness, health, addiction and rehabilitation into dialogue with one another. For Hirst, the display of pills represents a state of mind and the way that the contemporary individual has the ability to control feelings in body and mind through modern medicine.
This print is reminiscent of Hirst’s earliest pill cabinet work The Void from 2000. Notably this print depicts the mirrored back of the cabinet that works to produce a visually complexing and highly aestheticized art object. Editioned prints such as Pharmaceuticals embody Hirst’s artistic oeuvre that interrogates the intersections between the scientific and the artistic, that are wrongly assumed to be oppositional in contemporary culture.