Your Beauty
Your Beauty
Signed Print
Damien Hirst
Etching, 2015
Signed Print Edition of 55
H 92cm x W 67cm
Critical Review
Your Beauty is an etching from Damien Hirst’s 2015 The Wonder Of You series that shows ten butterflies scattered across the composition, set against a gold backdrop. The butterflies are depicted in photographic detail and in bright saturated colours like green, red, blue and purple.
The Wonder Of You series represents Hirst’s interest in combining hyperrealism with artificial colour and traditional methods of art making. Hirst has taken photographic themes as the basis of much of his work, notably beginning his Fact painting series in 2000. Of this obsession with the photographic Hirst has explained, “Art has been in constant battle for hundreds of years with every other kind of image-making…newspapers are supposed to be about facts and truth, and you believe you get a true view of the world from these images when you don’t: they’re completely fake.”
The hyperrealism of the butterflies in this print are undermined by the flatness of the gold backdrop. Hirst’s intuitive colour choice is based in aesthetic and non-rational demands that have remained in his practice since his art training at Goldsmiths. Your Beauty shows the butterflies in a playful array of bright and contrasting colours producing an eye-catching print with universal appeal.
