The Turner Prize-winning British artist Damien Hirst has created a new rainbow work to show support for the National Health Service (NHS) in the current Coronavirus crisis. Further details about the limited edition prints are available from HENI Editions: https://henieditions.com
The work, called Butterfly Rainbow, is made up of bands of coloured butterfly wings, one of the artist’s best-known motifs. It can be downloaded from Damien Hirst’s website and displayed in
I wanted to do something to pay tribute to the wonderful work NHS staff are doing
Damien Hirst said: “I wanted to do something to pay tribute to the wonderful work NHS staff are doing in hospitals around the country. The rainbow is a sign of hope and I think it is brilliant that parents and children are creating their own version and putting them up in the windows of their homes.”
A limited-edition of the work is also being produced, which will be sold with all profits donated to the NHS. Further details will be announced on Damien Hirst’s Instagram. He also created a heart in support of the Evening Standards food appeal, helping to feed vulnerable Londoners during the coronavirus crisis.
Across the UK, people have been showing their support for frontline NHS staff and other key workers as they deal with the deadly virus with painted rainbows in windows and communal clapping.
Damien Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol and grew up in Leeds. He studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths college from 1986 to 1989, and whilst in his second year, he conceived and curated the group exhibition, ‘Freeze’. The show is commonly acknowledged to have been the launching point not only for Hirst but for a generation of British artists.
Since the late 1980s, Hirst has created installations, sculptures, paintings and drawings that explore the complex relationships between art, beauty, religion, science, life and death. Through work that includes the iconic shark in formaldehyde, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) and For the Love of God(2007), a platinum cast of a skull set with 8,601 flawless pavé-set diamonds, he investigates and challenges contemporary belief systems, and dissects the uncertainties at the heart of the human experience. In April 2017, he presented his most complex project to date, ‘Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable’, across two museum spaces in Venice. Exceptional in scale, ‘Treasures’ examines ideas surrounding truth, authenticity and how we construct belief.
His work features in significant collections including the British Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate, the Stedelijk Museum, the Yale Center for British Art, The Broad Collection, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Fondazione Prada, and Museo Jumex, among many others.
Image: Damien Hirst, Butterfly Rainbow, 2020 © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2020