Andreas Schmitten, Gereon Lepper, Mathias Lanfer
Curated by Tony Cragg at Blain|Southern
2015
Curated by Tony Cragg
10 July 2015 - 29 August 2015
Blain|Southern London
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Damien Hirst
This Little Piggy Went to Market, This Little Piggy Stayed at Home
1996
This Little Piggy Went to Market, This Little Piggy Stayed at Home
1996
This Little Piggy Went to Market, This Little Piggy Stayed at Home, 1996, is a key early work from Hirst’s ‘Natural History’ series and one of only a handful of split animal formaldehyde works created by him in the 1990’s. Pathology, physiology and comparative anatomy feature continually in Hirst’s oeuvre, with comparable works from this series featuring in the permanent collections of LACMA, Los Angeles, Tate Modern, London, The Pinault Foundation at Palazzo Grassi, Venice and The Asturp Fearney Collection, Oslo, the present work is a stellar example of Hirst’s iconic taxidermical preserved carcasses.
Detail
Scale
Damien Hirst
PROVENANCE
The Artist
Charles Saatchi Collection
Collection of the Artist (acquired back from the above)
Private Collection, UK
EXHIBITIONS
New York, Gagosian Gallery, No Sense of Absolute Corruption, May - June 1996
London, Royal Academy of Arts, Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, September - December 1997
New York, Brooklyn Museum, Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, October 2, 1999 - January 9 2000
London, The Saatchi Gallery, Damien Hirst, April - August 2003
Naples, Museo Archeologica Nazionale, Damien Hirst: The Agony and the Ecstasy - Selected Works from 1989-2004, October 2004 - January 2005
Aylesbury, Waddesdon Manor, Christie's present House of Cards, May - October 2012 London, Gagosian Britannia Street, Damien Hirst 'Natual History' March 9. 2022 - January 7, 2023
LITERATURE
Royal Academy of Arts, Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, London, 1997, illustrated p. 98
Robert Violette, ed., Damien Hirst: I want to spend the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always, forever, now, London, 1997, illustrated in colour p. 291
Jonathan Barnbrook, Damien Hirst: Pictures from the Saatchi Gallery, London, 2001, illustrated in colour p. 48-51
L. Rothfield, Unsettling "Sensation": Arts-Policy Lessons from the Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy, New York, 2001, p.216, illustrated in colour p.68
The Saatchi Gallery, 10 0: The Work That Changed British Art, London, 2003, illustrated in colour p. 24-25 T. Siebers, The Return to Ritual: Violence and Art in the Media Age, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, No. 5.1, 2003, illustrated in colour p. 13
K. Bendiner, Food in Painting: From the Renaissance to the Present, London, 2004, illustrated in colour p.74
Eduardo Cicelyn, Damien Hirst: The Agony and the Ecstasy - Selected Works from 1989-2004, Naples, 2006, illustrated in colour p. 135-136
K. Cashell, Aftershock: The Ethics of Contemporary Transgressive Art, New York, 2009, illustrated p.193 Haunch of Venison, Damien Hirst & Michael Joo: Have You Ever Really Looked at the Sun?, Berlin, 2010, illustrated in colour no. 36
A. Gallagher, ed., Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Modern, Damien Hirst, 2012, p.94, illustrated in colour p.222
F. Bonami, Exhibition Catalogue, Doha, Alriwaq Doha, Damien Hirst- Relics, 2013, p.28
Detail
Incorporating his classic mordant humour, the pig is contained within two glass and steel tanks which slide mechanically ‘like a bacon slicer; slowly, tragically’ (D. Hirst cited in ‘An Interview with Damien Hirst’, Stuart Morgan, ‘No Sense of Absolute Corruption’, Gagosian Gallery, 1996, p.26) to perpetually unite then separate the corpse, Hirst wryly contrasts his macabre subject matter with the childhood references of nursery rhymes in his title, alluding to his notorious fascination with the fragility of life and inevitability of death. This obsession with mortality which led to his formaldehyde works, has created what can be seen as contemporary vanitas objects; a present day re-creation of the Dutch still life paintings from the seventeenth century that presented rotting fruit and insects within extravagant environments to reveal the transience of life. However here, Hirst has transformed the painterly tradition of memento mori within by controversially bringing the presence of death directly into our space. Hirst noted, "I am interested in realism. I want art to be life but it can never be" (D. Hirst cited in Damien Hirst, exh. cat., Naples, 2004,p.131).
No Sense of Absolute Corruption
Gagosian Gallery, New York
May - June 1996
Hirst’s interest in art as life feeds directly into a desire to leave a legacy, to claim his position within the dialogue of art history. The glass vitrine that encases his pig sardonically invokes the institutional framework for preserving art and the minimalist exhibitional strategies of the ‘white cube museum’. Whilst the dead pig itself deepens its art historical ties by channelling the Duchampian idea of the ready-made and the presentation of its biological form invokes the detached nature of Leonardo’s anatomical drawings.
Exhibited in the 1996 Gagosian Gallery show, No Sense of Absolute Corruption, Hirst’s first solo exhibition in New York, This Little Piggy Went to Market, This Little Piggy Stayed at Home, presents his most iconic technique at a crucially fertile moment in his career. In examining the processes of life and death and the metaphysical questions of existence, Hirst has dramatically transformed a subject of rural beauty to a mummified carcass frozen as an emblem of twentieth century British art.
Installation View of This Little Piggy Went to Market, This Little Piggy Went Home, 1996 at Gagosian Gallery New York
Damien Hirst at the 1996 Gagosian Exhibition
Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection
Royal Academy of Arts, London
September - December 1997
After visiting Damien Hirst’s exhibition Freeze in 1988, and seeing the artist’s first major animal installation, A Thousand Years, art dealer and collector Charles Saatchi set his sights on the art that was to become known as Young British Art. He became Hirst’s first collector, and an important sponsor for other Young British Artists. From 1992, Saatchi put on a series of shows called Young British Artists, bringing a great deal of media coverage to these artists.
The Sensation art show at the Royal Academy was really the point at which the importance of the Young British Artists was solidified. The exhibition attracted around 300.000 visitors, provoked many protests and started a media sensation.
Today, Sensation is considered to be one of the most significant exhibitions of contemporary art in the 20th century. It also went down in history as one of the most controversial shows the art world ever saw. The show attracted a record number of visitors at the time, and catapulted the Young British Artists into the mainstream art world, launching many a shining career.
The YBAs enjoyed a great deal of publicity, and even used the tabloids as an alternative space to represent themselves, using all the publicity, good and bad, to their advantage as their names became bigger and more notorious.
In 1999, this monumental exhibition that included approximately ninety paintings, sculptures, photographs, and installations by the forty-two artists, was presented for the first time in the United States at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
