DAMIENHIRST(b. 1966)After Stubbs.Cigarette butts, MDF and glass wall mounted cabinet.48 x 72 in. (121.9 x 182.9 cm).Executed in 1993.Provenance
Gagosian Gallery, New York"The smoking thing is like a mini life cycle. For me the cigarette can stand for life. The packet with its possible cigarettes stands for birth. The lighter can signify God, which gives life to the whole situation. The ashtray represents death, but as soon as you read it like that you feel ridiculous. Because being metaphorical is ridiculous, but it's unavoidable" (Damien Hirst quoted in R. Violette & D. Hirst, I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always Forever, Now, London 1997, p. 102).

Damien Hirst's artwork focuses on the cycles of creation and destruction, whether physical, biological or aesthetic. In this sense, one may see Hirst's work as a series of propositions, or questions that draw the viewer to consider the big issues of existence, but without becoming entangled with a tired and bleak form of expression. Hirst provokes this examination of life and death most perfectly in the present lot, After Stubbs, 1993, in which cigarettes serve as his vehicle to address such issues.

After Stubbs does not function to lecture the viewer, but to provoke the issue of morality with a great sense of irony and wit. By enshrining the stubbed-out cigarette butts on shelves encased in a glass vitrine, Hirst essentially elevates the cigarette to a heroic and simultaneously comedic status leading the viewer to think about the larger issues related to smoking and cigarettes. Hirst goes on to explain, "I want a glimpse of an idea of what it's like to die. I'll stop when I'm bored or when I'm barking like a dog in the gutter on my hands and knees I might get hit by a truck before then anyway. …cigarettes are such clinical forms. They are like pills. They have a purity before you smoke them. They're expensive, dangerous, from the point you light one to when you stubb it out, it's death" (ibid, p. 670). While most instinctively fear death, Hirst confronts mortality by pointing out the reality of its existence. It was in fact Hirst, who at the age of sixteen, took the unusual step of having his photograph taken, laughing next to the severed head of a human corpse. Hirst has said "I'm going to die and I want to live forever. I can't escape the fact and I can't let go of the idea". It is ultimately within this paradox that After Stubbs expresses the age-old issues of the mortal condition in a humorous and entirely contemporary way.