Damien Hirst // Andy Warhol
05 FEBRUARY 2008 - 15 FEBRUARY 2008
Gow Langsford Gallery presents Damien Hirst, For the Love of God, Laugh and Andy Warhol, Dollar Sign. Two works by two of the most influential artists of our time.
For the Love of God is possibly the most famous artwork produced in recent decades and is the latest feat of super-artist / necromancer Damien Hirst. Inadvertently titled by his mother who questioned “for the love of God what are you going to do next?”, the work consists of more than 8,500 flawless diamonds encrusted into a platinum cast of a human skull - a skull thought to be that of a European living between 1720 and 1810. The manufacturing costs of For the Love of God are estimated at 14 million pounds - the work reportedly sold for a record 50 million pounds in 2007. While also a traditional ‘Memento Mori’ (an object that addresses the transience of human existence) the ostentation of For the Love of God proclaims victory over decay and raises questions of mortality, morality and money.
For the Love of God, Laugh is one of a series of four editioned screen prints of the diamond skull. This particular edition is unique with a layer of alluring diamond dust framing the image whilst alluding to the original object. Other works in the series include For the Love of God, Believe; For the Love of God, Pray and For the Love of God, Shine.
Featured with Hirst's skull, is Dollar Sign, a signature work in the extreme, the signature for cash, for art, and for Warhol himself. Perhaps nothing (other than diamonds) speaks more clearly of consumerism than the dollar sign itself. Warhol began painting bank notes in the early 1960s and returned to the theme in the early 1980s, a time by which he felt paintings themselves had become a consumer item. Replacing the sign for art with the sign for money, his dollar sign series are considered to be as important as his Campbell’s Soup series in his reinvention of what art is, and what the artist himself could get away with.
Born Andy Warhola in Pittsburgh in 1928, Andy Warhol emerged as one of the world’s most significant artists and was central to the Pop Art movement. Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books and documentary films since his death in 1987. He is generally acknowledged as one the most influential artists of the 21st Century.
Damien Hirst was born in Bristol in 1965 and, for the past two decades has been widely acknowledged as one of the most influential and significant artists of his generation.