Damien Hirst

£25,000-£35,000 VALUE (EST.)

$45,000-$60,000 VALUE (EST.)

$40,000-$60,000 VALUE (EST.)

¥210,000-¥290,000 VALUE (EST.)

€28,000-€40,000 VALUE (EST.)

$240,000-$330,000 VALUE (EST.)

¥4,090,000-¥5,720,000 VALUE (EST.)

$30,000-$40,000 VALUE (EST.)

38% AAGR

This estimate blends recent public auction records with our own private sale data and network demand.

Auction Date

Auction House

Artwork

Hammer Price

Return to Seller

Buyer Paid

October 2015

Christie's New York - United States

Cathedral, Duomo - Signed Print

May 2014

Sotheby's London - United Kingdom

Cathedral, Duomo - Signed Print

April 2012

Sotheby's New York - United States

Cathedral, Duomo - Signed Print

Meaning & Analysis

Cathedral, Duomo is a screen print from Damien Hirst’s 2007 Cathedral series that shows a brightly coloured, kaleidoscopic composition. Made up of carefully arranged butterfly wings, this print is symmetrical in form and radiates with colours of red, blue, orange and yellow.

read more about Cathedral

The prints in the Cathedral series directly reference stained-glass windows in their complex, geometric patterns and are reminiscent of Hirst’s famous ‘Kaleidoscope paintings’ that can be located throughout his career, the first from 2001 titled It’s A Wonderful World. The Cathedral series can most obviously be compared to Hirst’s Superstition series (2006), a series of kaleidoscopic paintings that take their form as pointed arch shaped canvas, mimicking the windows in a cathedral. In their beauty and precision, obscuring the wings of butterflies into an abstract pattern, Cathedral, Duomo synthesises Hirst’s fascination with the intersection between religion, aesthetics and science that govern humanity.

For Hirst, the butterfly is a ‘universal trigger’ that many people share in finding attractive and joyous. Recalling someone once saying to him: “Butterflies are beautiful, but it’s a shame they have disgusting hairy bodies in the middle,” Hirst in works like this chose only to display the dazzling wings of the insect. Across the series, the butterfly wing is rendered unrecognisable when viewed at a distance and as part of the larger intricate pattern.