In and Out of Love (Butterfly Paintings and Ashtrays)
Date:
1991
Materials & Techniques:
Eight paintings, household paint on canvas with butterflies; four boxes; one table, formica top on steel base; four glass ashtrays filled with cigarette butts
“It’s about love and realism, dreams, ideals, symbols, life and death. I worked out many possible trajectories for these things, like the way the real butterfly can destroy the ideal (birthday-card) kind of love; the symbol exists apart from the real thing. Or the butterflies still being beautiful even when dead. All these things are completely thrown off balance by a comparison I tried to make between art and life, in the upstairs and downstairs installations, a crazy thing to do when in the end it’s all art.” —Damien Hirst Between June 21 and July 26, 1991, visitors to the Woodstock Street Gallery (a former travel agency) experienced a two-floor installation. In the upstairs room, In and Out of Love (White Paintings and Live Butterflies), butterflies were hatched and lived on sugar water in an artificial humid environment until they died. The walls were lined with five monochrome primed canvases on which were attached pupae. Plants were placed below to attract the butterflies to settle back on each canvas after hatching. Downstairs, In and Out of Love (Butterfly Paintings and Ashtrays) featured eight paintings in bright pastel colors, each with dead butterflies pressed into their surfaces of high gloss paint. Along with the paintings was the table with four ashtrays loaded with cigarette butts and ash, redolent of the aftermath of a crowded private view. Four large cubes, each with a single hole in each side, were placed around the room. These cubes echoed ones recently seen in Hirst’s A Hundred Years (1990) and A Thousand Years (1990), vitrines in which maggots hatched into flies from inside similar cubes. By using an upstairs and a downstairs, Hirst created the entire life cycle of butterflies in the upstairs space and then made those butterflies into art downstairs. Gallery label for Love, Life, Death, and Desire: An Installation of the Center's Collections (Yale Center for British Art, 2020-11-01 – 2021-02-28)
