Dead Black Brilliant Utopia
Dead Black Brilliant Utopia
Signed Print
Damien Hirst
86 x 76cm, Edition of 55, Digital Print, 2013
£5,000-£7,500
$9,500-$14,500 Market Value Indicator
$9,500-$14,000 Market Value Indicator
¥45,000-¥70,000 Market Value Indicator
€6,000-€9,000 Market Value Indicator
$50,000-$80,000 Market Value Indicator
¥1,070,000-¥1,610,000 Market Value Indicator
$6,500-$10,000 Market Value Indicator
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Meaning & Analysis
Dead Black Brilliant Utopia is an inkjet, glaze, and foil block print from Damien Hirst’s Utopia series from 2013. The print shows an image of Hirst’s sculpture from 2000, The Void, the artist's first pill cabinet work that he ever made. Depicting several rows of pills on display in a medical cabinet, the print is rendered in a cropped composition and in high contrast.
Throughout Hirst’s artistic career he has used medical and pill iconography to question how ‘art’ and ‘medicine’ art are defined in contemporary culture. Making a direct comparison between the two, which at first seems unusual, Hirst makes clear the way in which both art and medicine are constructed systems that people choose to believe in. While an individuals’ position can change as a drug remains the same, so too is art’s value dependent on what viewers and institutions are willing to praise it with.
The Utopia series as well as earlier works like The Void and Hirst’s 1992 installation Pharmacy transform medicine into high art, highlighting the audience’s relationship to medicine as subjective as our relationship to art. Dead Black Brilliant Utopia is a mesmerising and visually complex image due to the unusual display of pills in varying sizes in a mirrored cabinet.
