Damien Hirst‘s love affair with pills of all shapes and colours continues. He is opening his own private museum in 2015 which will feature many of his pharmaceuticals works and earlier this year he launched a new “pill-inspired” jewellery collection. This Autumn, the Paul Stolper Gallery will give us another opportunity to review the work of this polarising figure in the art world and his recurring theme: his deep belief that art heals.

IMAGE: Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates, courtesy Paul Stolper Gallery © Damien Hirst and Other Criteria, All rights reserved, DACS 2014

Damien Hirst‘s love affair with pills of all shapes and colours continues. He is opening his own private museum in 2015 which will feature many of his pharmaceuticals works and earlier this year he launched a new “pill-inspired” jewellery collection. This Autumn, the Paul Stolper Gallery will give us another opportunity to review the work of this polarising figure in the art world and his recurring theme: his deep belief that art heals.

“Pills are a brilliant little form, better than any minimalist art,” said Hirst of his theme. “They’re all designed to make you buy them… they come out of flowers, plants, things from the ground, and they make you feel good, you know, to have a pill, to feel beauty.”

Over the years, Hirst’s focus has continually returned to pharmaceuticals and their importance, both physical and symbolical, in our lives. 

Medicine Cabinets Damien Hirst

IMAGE: ‘Medicine Cabinets’, L & M Arts, New York, 2010. Photographed by Tom Powel Imaging Inc., courtesy of L & M Arts © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2012

His first Pill Cabinet series appeared in 2007 and since then he has come back to this topic throughout his career. “I did a load of medicine cabinets a long time ago and I named them after Sex Pistols songs. I suppose I must be getting old if I’m naming work after Philip Larkin poems now”.

Red hot chilly peppers

IMAGE: Cover of the Red Hot Chilly Peppers Album. © Damien Hirst 2014

Apart from an inspiring innovator, he has an eye for business and his jewellery collections are quite the example. His last collection, launched previously this year, was called “The Cathedral Collection” and its most controversial item was the “Pill Rosary”, a variation of the traditional Catholic string of beads in which the cross was replaced by a Hirst pill that opened up and spilled rubies and black and white diamonds.

ring

rosary2 copy

IMAGES: “Pill Ring” and “Pill Rosary” detail. © Damien Hirst 2014

The new works on display at the Paul Stolper Gallery  will play with scale, featuring sculptures of pills, medicine bottles and other objects that reach 1.5 metres in height, creating a Alice in Wonderland sensation. Its aim: to make us reflect on our life-long trust in modern medicine and if, as Damien Hirst defends, art heals.

Another question, of course, is whether art other than medicine heals…

 

Schizophrenogenesis by Damien Hirst will be open from the 9 October to the 15 November at the Paul Stolper Gallery (31 Museum Street, London)