Name: The Cure (emerald green, powder pink, victorian purple)
Brand: Damien Hirst
Rating: 4.9 (183 reviews)

Meaning & Analysis

The Cure (emerald green / powder pink / victorian purple) is a silkscreen print by Damien Hirst on Somerset Tub. The print, which was produced in 2014, shows a large two-colour pill. The print is rendered in the centre of the composition in powder pink and Victorian purple. The pill’s colours clash with the emerald green backdrop.

read more about The Cure

The Cure (emerald green, powder pink, victorian purple) is one of thirty silkscreen prints that compose Hirst’s The Cure series. The series is inspired by modern medicine and the pharmaceutical industry. This theme is further explored by Hirst in his Eat the Rich series in which the artist depicts pharmaceutical packaging, as opposed to the products themselves, like he does in this series. Each print in The Cure series depicts a singular pill with ‘this end up’ written in faded, capitalised letters. The colours vary among the prints, with some bold colours that clash with one another, and others using various tones of the same colour. Each colour combination is unique, bringing dynamism to the series.

The bold and vibrant colours Hirst uses in The Cure (emerald green, powder pink, victorian purple), as well as the silkscreen printing technique resonates with the Pop Art aesthetic developed by Andy Warhol in the 1960s. Warhol clearly influenced Hirst’s work and Hirst’s repetition of the pill in The Cure series resonates with Warhol’s prints of Campbell’s Soup cans.