Gagosian Gallery, London
Acquired by the present owner from the above in February 2007

Beverly Hills, Gagosian Gallery, Damien Hirst: Superstition, February - April 2007, p. 15, illustrated in color, p. 17, illustrated in color (detail), and p. 168, illustrated in color (as installed)

This work is in very good condition overall. There is evidence of light wear and handling to the sides of the frame. There are scattered surface abrasions to the Plexiglas.
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Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
Clusters of lights over empty chairs
That face each other, coloured differently.
Through open doors, the dining-room declares
A larger loneliness of knives and glass
And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.

In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How
Isolated, like a fort, it is –
The headed paper, made for writing home
(if home existed) letters of exile. Now
night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.

- Philip Larkin, Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel

Echoing the breathtaking effect of such glorious rose windows as are found at Notre Dame de Paris and Chartres, Damien Hirst’s butterfly and gloss on canvas tondo shimmers with the promise of a world beyond our own. Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel – Conception was exhibited in the critically claimed 2007 show Superstition in which each work was given two titles. The first stems from British poet Philip Larkin’s most celebrated volume of poems entitled ‘High Windows,’ and the sﷺecond is a direct reference to religious iconography. Larkin’s poetry is fraught with intimations of mortality and the inevitability of death in post-war Britain, much like how Hirst’s entire œuvre addresses the interconnectedness of religion and mortality with science and art, here accented by the fragility of the butterfly.

This particular series of butterfly paintings differs from Hirst’s first scattered compositions of butterflies captured mid-flight against luscious pools of glossy paint, stemming from the 1991 installation In and Out of Love. His original concept and installation demonstrates the oxymoronic beauty of horror, and horror of beauty. The caterpillar dies in its chrysalis, and is reborn as a butterfly. The butterflies become stuck to the wet canvases and therein die, giving birth to a beautiful object, a work of art. Like a view into a kaleidoscope, Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel – Conception is an awe-inducing composition of the delicate intricacy of order versus chaos. As ever in Hirst’s work, beauty is laced with death๊.

Set into a paint film of celestial black glo𓆉ss, the naturally saturated, exuberant hues of the butterflies’ gossamer wings—iridescent and reflecting light—are so mesmerizing that they stun the viewer into contemplation. Its appearance changes when viewed from different distances and perspective; from afar, the individual wings resemble jewel-like tesserae in a mosaic, brimming with turquoise, azurite, amber and yellow sapphires, each color subservient to the chromatic design of the overarching principle. Up close, instead of the lives of the saints, it is the individual specimens that become discernible. A plethora of different species—some large some small, some brightly colored and others mottled—their fragile existence and brief lifespan sudd🍌enly become poignant in their enshrinement in household gloss, culminating in an object of bewildering beauty.